Impressive and a nice site. Regarding font generation, let's not forget Donald Knuth and his https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafont software which generates raster fonts.
I Created 175 Fonts Using Rust
41–50 of 117 posts
Re: I Created 175 Fonts Using Rust
#42Nice work I would like microns on the vowles, as we type a lot of Māori words....
Is a micron the name of the straight line over the 'a' in Māori? A single pixel line over a bunch of a's is tremendously simple to do in pixel fonts, I could probably add that to all the fonts in a day... hmmmm
The straight bars over vowels are called “macrons” in English. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macron_(diacritic)
In Māori, there are ā, ē, ī, ō and ū.
Re: I Created 175 Fonts Using Rust
#43This is neat! And cool to hear this made a financial difference for them. Gah, I remember the name Chevy Ray from indie games, but I cannot put my finger on what this person made… would have been like 2010 to 2012? In the same vein as VVVVVV or nidhogg or canabalt as I recall
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Re: I Created 175 Fonts Using Rust
#44Impressive work!
In the "mixed-case kerning pairs" quality testing image, I notice that the letter "j" sometimes reaches under the previous letter, like in "Fdj". Sometimes it creates a lot of space, like in "Fjo". Is there a stylistic reason for this? The Fjo spacing is the only thing that stood out to me.
Kudos
Re: I Created 175 Fonts Using Rust
#45Impressive work! In the "mixed-case kerning pairs" quality testing image, I notice that the letter "j" sometimes reaches under the previous letter, like in "Fdj". Sometimes it creates a lot of space, like in "Fjo". Is there a stylistic reason for this? The Fjo spacing is the only thing that stood out to me. Kudos
Nice catch. That's a culprit of the `auto_kerning_min` property that you'll see on a lot of the fonts. this tells the auto kerner not to exceed that.
I added this parameter because I fouund that for a lot of fonts, squeezing letters together over a certain distance would just look bad, so I would set -1 or -2 as a cap.
It looks like that's just one that snuck past my notice. The word "Fjord" would look strange because of this. This is a good example of how even with the quality testing, things can get through, because I still have to visually glance over hundreds of kerning tests.
One thing that might be a nice adjustment is to have an algorithm that detects the "area" between two letters, so basically how many pixels can volumetrically fit between them, and flag ones that go over a certain threshold. I could then color those tuples as red in the sample text, basically the system marking them as "potential problems" that required an author's look.
Re: I Created 175 Fonts Using Rust
#46Impressive work! In the "mixed-case kerning pairs" quality testing image, I notice that the letter "j" sometimes reaches under the previous letter, like in "Fdj". Sometimes it creates a lot of space, like in "Fjo". Is there a stylistic reason for this? The Fjo spacing is the only thing that stood out to me. Kudos
Nice catch. That's a culprit of the `auto_kerning_min` property that you'll see on a lot of the fonts. this tells the auto kerner not to exceed that. I added this parameter because I fouund that for a lot of fonts, squeezing letters together over a certain distance would just look bad, so I would set -1 or -2 as a cap. It looks like that's just one that snuck past my notice. The word "Fjord" would look strange becaus…
Why not just feed that information back into the algorithm itself?
Re: I Created 175 Fonts Using Rust
#47Impressive indeed. Making a complete font set can easily take as long as a year. The tasks include to go from 'A' to 'Z', upper and lower case, plus all the glyphs (brackets, ampersand, exclamation marks etc). Optionally the variations (bold, italic etc) without which a font is of limited use. The thing that separates the men from the boys is the kerning (spacing between the characters) which can absorb as much obses…
> Making a complete font set can easily take as long as a year. The tasks include to go from 'A' to 'Z', upper and lower case, plus all the glyphs (brackets, ampersand, exclamation marks etc).
That's when you're limiting the font to purely English usage. If you want to support any other language you have to add more characters, even for languages that also use the latin alphabet (e.g., French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, etc). Then you may want to support Greek and Cyrillic, Japanese, Chinese, …
For example, “Noto fonts cover over 77,000 characters, which is around half of the 149,186 characters defined in Unicode 15.0” according to the font's Wikipedia entry.
Re: I Created 175 Fonts Using Rust
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nice catch. That's a culprit of the `auto_kerning_min` property that you'll see on a lot of the fonts. this tells the auto kerner not to exceed that. I added this parameter because I fouund that for a lot of fonts, squeezing letters together over a certain distance would just look bad, so I would set -1 or -2 as a cap. It looks like that's just one that snuck past my notice. The word "Fjord" would look strange becaus…
Why not just feed that information back into the algorithm itself?
I definitely could, I would have to do a bit of tests to see what kinds of volumes deserved special treatment.
Usually the way I do things is I start by doing work manually. If I find that there's a common pattern in something I'm doing that could be automated, then I am able to transcribe it into the algorithm because I just follow the same steps I've been using in my head.
This wasn't a thing that actually came up a huge amount, as these glaring pairs aren't tremendously common. But they're just common enough that if I sat down and examined them, I could probably say something like "hey if 1.5 vertical lines worth of pixels are between two letters, kern this extra" or something like that.
Re: I Created 175 Fonts Using Rust
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is a micron the name of the straight line over the 'a' in Māori? A single pixel line over a bunch of a's is tremendously simple to do in pixel fonts, I could probably add that to all the fonts in a day... hmmmm
The straight bars over vowels are called “macrons” in English. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macron_(diacritic) In Māori, there are ā, ē, ī, ō and ū.
Ahh yes there it is, thanks for clarifying. These are quite simple and would be easy to support.
Re: I Created 175 Fonts Using Rust
#50Btw anyone who's into fonts should check out https://tomorrow.type.today/ they're a typography studio that does fantastic original and experimental fonts. One of our team is super into typography and has been building a collection of their work at https://play.soot.com/tomorrowtypetoday
just as a note: the company is registered in Russia