If you’re a new font designer wondering how to set your OpenType font’s em-height and line-spacing, the advice you’ll find online is just about all wrong. Technology has changed, and the historical measures no longer hold true. Here’s how you do it in FontForge.
The Coelacanth typeface I’m creating is classic Venetian style, harking back to an age before bold type was invented. Bruce Rogers didn’t create a bold for Centaur (on which Coelacanth is based), but we now live in an age of philistines, and bold type is ubiquitous. I’d like Coelacanth to be versatile and meet all …
To save time and eyesight, use this text for testing character-spacing and kerning. It has all the usual character combos, with the main kerning pairs heading the list. Leslie Cabarga, creator of the excellent Kern King, hinted that someone could go one better. Well, this text adds many common, useful character pairs, plus all-caps and …
It’s not so often you need to code your own bezier curves nowadays. If you do, here’s a fast algorithm which uses fewer arithmetic operations — and additions only. I felt very clever when I discovered this a dozen years ago, but I wasn’t the first.
When designing the Coelacanth typeface, my remake of Bruce Roger’s Centaur, I created the italics from scratch because I didn’t feel that Arrighi, the italic normally used with Centaur, really matches the roman. Arrighi is very nice, but quite different. Here’s what I did:
Of the hundreds of thousands of free fonts on the web, only a tiny handful are ‘text’ fonts suitable for plain text. Some of these have bold and italic variants, perhaps even small capitals; but almost none offer different optical sizes. In fact, when I began this project, not a single freeware font existed with …
Coelacanth: a type family inspired by Bruce Rogers’ Centaur Read More »
Peg Aloi published a review of my book Trials of the Moon (Whitmore 2010) in 2011 in The Pomegranate volume 12 number 2. She had earlier published a “brief critique” (2010) which I declined to publish a response to, as I felt it grossly misrepresented the content and arguments of my book. Her formal review, …
Response to Peg Aloi’s review of Trials of the Moon Read More »