bsittler: γ and ν

bsittler (

bsittler) wrote,
@ 2006-12-24 11:04:00

γ and ν
thanks to fontforge and potrace, two fonts i drew many years ago are now available in vector form. the fonts are licensed under the gpl and i retain the copyright. Update: They are now dual-licensed under ofl and gpl (with an embedding exclusion: embedding these fonts in a document does not force that document to be gpl'ed)

: Gamma is a fixed-width small-caps font seen previously in beta versions of VS Bomber (ttf · svg · sfd)
: GammaVariable is a variable-width version of Gamma (ttf · svg · sfd)
: NuFraktur is a fixed-width Fraktur-style font i've mentioned previously. (ttf · svg · sfd)
: NuFrakturVariable is a variable-width version of NuFraktur (ttf · svg · sfd)

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	kragen 2006-12-25 10:55 am UTC (link)
	Nifty! (Reply to this)

How do I do this?

kragen
2007-01-05 11:34 am UTC (link)

I'm having a hard time getting good results this way, and I'm not sure how to do the last steps of the process --- getting from an SVG image of some letters to a font.

I photographed a pencil-drawn font with Bea's camera, adaptively thresholded it in the GIMP, oilpainted it to clean it up a bit, and potraced it to an SVG. Each step made it look a bit worse. I was able to clean up the results a bit with Inkscape once I had it in SVG format.

Adaptive threshold (necessary due to uneven page lighting): crop out non-page parts of photo, duplicate layer, gaussian blur with a radius of 64 or 128, set layer to 50% transparent in "subtract" mode, merge down. Resulting image is much flatter than original; now I can use just the normal threshold tool. Flatter image looks pretty good actually until I try to threshold it.

Any advice?

(Reply to this)(Thread)

Re: How do I do this?

bsittler
2007-01-05 10:41 pm UTC (link)

i used a long netpbm pipeline to prepare the individual letters for potrace. it went something like this (from memory):

slice apart font image into individual glyph images. run the following pipeline on each glyph (i used a bash while loop):
1. pnmnorm
2. pamstretch 2
3. brighten or dim (optional, hand-tweaked)
4. ppmtopgm -nofs
5. potrace -s
6. name the result unixxxx.svg, xxxx is the codepoint in hex

then fontforge imported them all using the "template" mode

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

Re: How do I do this?

kragen
2007-01-05 11:16 pm UTC (link)

Thanks! It sounds like starting with a high-quality rasterization (you designed the fonts by hand with a pixel editor, I assume) made it pretty easy for you.

I'm finding Inkscape is easier to edit paths in than fontforge --- being able to remove control points from the curve with 'delete' (without breaking the curve!) makes simplifying curves a lot faster, the real-time view of the filled outline shape is very helpful for understanding the effects of moving a control point on the stroke width, and cycling between different kinds of points is handy as well. The "smooth" type of point is especially useful.

But fontforge is a lot easier to figure out how to use. In Inkscape I still don't know how to create a new path or join two paths to make a bigger path, despite having worked through several tutorials.

It's a shame that it's so difficult to get glyphs from Inkscape into fontforge. As far as I can tell, Inkscape doesn't support SVG fonts.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	Re: How do I do this? kragen 2007-01-05 11:58 pm UTC (link)
	Oops, fontforge has "smooth" points --- I was talking about "symmetric" points. (Reply to this)(Parent)

Re: How do I do this?

bsittler
2007-01-06 12:15 am UTC (link)

yeah, gamma and nu were drawn in xpixmap many years ago, iirc. or possibly on a windoze box in fractal design painter or the wfw311 version of ms paint.

however, i did use the pipeline above for snowflake conversions and did make an experimental snowflake font using it (so far it's not big enough to bother releasing, i think.)

you might try the eps import path from inkscape if there is one. or you could try skencil —

smws has used it to great effect.

(Reply to this)(Parent)

	prokoudine 2007-04-27 09:59 pm UTC (link)
	Hi, Did you think about licensing them under Open Font License and submitting to Open Font Library? ;-) (Reply to this)(Thread)

	bsittler 2007-04-28 12:42 am UTC (link)
	i might consider dual-licensing (gpl + ofl). not a bad idea :) (Reply to this)(Parent)

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