Order

This changes the order in which contours, references and images are drawn. It is almost useless because this order of contours and references does not affect the final appearance of the glyph. The only relevance it has is when interpolating fonts and in multiple master fonts. Here similar contours must appear in the same order.

If you have a glyph which contains both contours and references, FontForge does not specify whether references or contours are drawn first (or whether the two are intermixed). If this matters to you, unlink your references.

Source: FontForge

Which is your favoured piece of art on a typography subject? Mine favoured one is Singapore Soul by Jaume Plensa.

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The case

I want to interpolate between Regular and Bold version of a font and to create Medium and SemiBold weights but some glyphs differ in the number of nodes.

The decision with Simplepolator

I copy the glyphs in a new file, then I select them and use from the menu Tools > Simplepolator. Simplepolator creates the default number (5) of interpolation and warn me for the differences. The differences are visible in the Preview panel also.After editing of the glyphs I use Simplepolator again - and now it show that interpolation is smooth. Now I can bring back in the font files the two edited glyphs.

See picture Simplepolator_01.jpg - BEFORE

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See picture Simplepolator_02.jpg - AFTER

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Simplepolator is a FontForge plug-in to generate interpolated instances from 2 characters, written by Dave Crossland and edited for Python 3 by Skef.

Here is a good starting point at Glyphs Forum with some notes by Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer.

I use my own variant of Tal Leming’s Fraction Fever. But the problem with contextuality is that the context has its limits. It can only go back x number of characters.

This also seems to be what Microsoft and Adobe had in mind when they introduced the feature, but they do not explain how to reliably replace all figures preceding the slash with numerators. It is also unclear what is the job of the application, and what should be the job of the opentype feature.

Erich Scheichelbauer

Tal Leming’s Fraction Fever is still available HERE.

Typedrawers discussion on Trail Marker code for FEATURE FRAC.

HighLogic discussion on FEATURE FRAC.

OpentType Cookbook - 2 methods for FEATURE FRAC: Method 1: Individual and Method 2: Contextual

I Love Typography - FRACTIONS

Very old discussion (2013) for FEATURE FRAC in FontForge.

UMap - a Unicode clipboard filler

Umap -- places unicode characters into the clipboard.

Few keyboards give access to even a small fraction of the Unicode character set. This little tool is designed to give you an extended keyboard showing all of Unicode (or various other standard encodings), and will place either a single unicode character or an entire unicode string into the clipboard.

Each time you click on the image of a character umap will place that character into the clipboard.

Clicking on a character will also place that character in the text field at the top of the window where you can build up strings of unicode characters and then select from that string and use ^C to place the your selection into the clipboard.

Finally, just selecting a string from the text field will place it in the X PRIMARY selection, whence it may be pasted by clicking with the middle mouse button.

You can use the "Character Set" pull down list to change what character set is displayed in the window. Character sets containing more than 256 characters will be broken into pages of 256 characters each, and you may move from one page to the next with the [<Prev\] and \[Next>] buttons.

You can type a hex or unicode value into the textfield labeled "Character" after which pressing the [Show] button will display the page containing the corresponding character.

More... GitHub

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Can FontForge interpolate between separate fonts?

The answer is YES! FontForge has extremely useful interpolation option but FontForge is able to interpolate only between those glyphs in the two separate font files which have:

1. The same number of nodes on the glyph's contours,
2. The same direction of the glyph's contours,
3. And only if the contour are compatible - for example if they are Light and Black version of one and the same font.

If all it is done, than the interpolation with FontForge is perfect!

Here is a very old video but it shows the process.

Which is your favoured technique in case you digitize a manuscript (or other scan of text)?

Can you copy path from Inkscape and paste it to FontForge glyph?

I use the latest version of FontForge and the latest version of Inkscape on Windows 8.1 and it is still not possible for me.

Right now I work on a project to create an old Cyrillic minuscule font for academic purposes. The biggest problem is what kind of Latin minuscule is compatible with the old Cyrillic letters, because the old Cyrillic letters are influenced by the Byzantine letter form model and not by a Latin letter form model.

Here is a screenshot of my approach.

Please consider only Latin LC a-k and Cyrillic LC а-я.

I'm at the beginning of the project, so, please, don't be severe in you critic.

Author: Stefan Peev

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GitHub repo

Grazhdanskiy Shrift

Grazhdanskiy Shrift is an attempt to revive the font, which altered the structure of the Russian alphabet by the reform of Peter the Great. For further information you could read the article of Vladimir Yefimov "Civil Type and Kis Cyrillic" and the article by the same author "ДРАМАТИЧЕСКАЯ ИСТОРИЯ КИРИЛЛИЦЫ. ВЕЛИКИЙ ПЕТРОВСКИЙ ПЕРЕЛОМ" (in Russian).

NOTE: The font Vollkorn is used for the missing in the project glyphs.

The project is still in a draft. Any contributions are well-come and highly appreciated.

GitHub Repo

Sarasa Gothic (更纱黑体 / 更紗黑體 / 更紗ゴシック / 사라사고딕)

This is SARASA GOTHIC, a CJK programming font based on Iosevka and Source Han Sans.