Artisanal typefaces
Are you tired of that limited look in your lettering?
Tired of appearing perfectly ubitiquous and uniform in all your precious printed passages?
Do you feel stifled by so much standard script? By all those same old generic glphys? By seeing your writing rendered in the most regular representations around?
Well, I once did. It was not long ago. I was dreaming of something somewhat irregular instead.
D.I.Why
I was dreaming of handwritten writing, but in a computer context. A real typeface, but one which onto the screen would set simple scans of my own pen on paper. I was wanting to build a new website for myself, (what turned out to be this very website) and I thought this: making my own irregular typefaces would be just the thing.
How hard would it be? I was prepared to proceed most methodically, to use a regular grid, printed out, and draw all the characters in by hand, in lots of little boxes, and then photograph it, and then rectify it, and procedurally crop each box, and then, ...and then what?
I needed a way to turn those scans of close-cropped characters into compact computer curves (hopefully compactly encoded). I asked: are there tools for cleanly converting a pixel-packed photo into a minimal mathy medium?
I didn't take long in my search before I discovered Potrace, and tried it out. It was perfect. From there I had a line of sight to the summit, so to speak.
I next looked into FontForge, a software system I knew of, somewhat, and what luck: they have a package for programatic use. Just my piece of pie.
Unforeseen font fun
So, I got to scripting. I learned the basics of Potrace, and of FontForge. I set up a simple, printer friendly, grid of known proportions, and worked out a couple of simple scripts using Image Magick to rectify and crop. And it was at that point I thought: you know, as a test, I should just print out typical typed text into those little boxes, and photograph that, and re-digitize it, and see if things line up right, as a sanity check.
So I did, and even before pressed the shutter button on my camera(phone), I knew this procedure could produce a complementary, and entirely alternate product. Not digitized handwriting, but physicalized computer writing, (re-digitized). So before I proceeded with the primary project (making my very own handwritten font), I switched to this side sojourn.
What came out was: a couple of "facsimile" typefaces, as I've been calling them:
Back to it: that which was to be digitized
So then, after I processed those two classic computer typefaces with this digital-to-physical-to-digital procedure, I returned to my original idea: going just physical-to-digital, with handwriting.
And what came out of that was: a typeface I've called:
Do I like this?
Yes, I do. If you're reading this, you may have noticed I'm using these three typefaces for this very website. And I foresee forthcoming use for other prospective projects.
See the source
Please do check out the project repository if you'd like to see exactly how this procedure proceeds, using a few specialized scripts and systematic schemes.