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A Font for Pictographs

From:Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...>
Date:Friday, December 12, 2008, 23:36
Several years ago I played around briefly with a font consisting of bits and pieces of
characters that could be put together to draw pictographic characters (or alien
alphabets). The original project got to be too cumbersome, and the results
weren't all that good.

The idea is that you could have many different alphabets or pictographs on a
conlang website using only one single font that users could download and
install. That way they could look at your web site, and if you added new
pictographs they wouldn't have to download a new font, since the one font is
capable of displaying all your pictographs, even ones you haven't invented yet.

It seems that in my multi-year project cycle the idea bubbled to the surface
again and I created a True Type font that can be used to draw pictographs,
alphabetical characters, syllabary symbols, or whatever. Basically, a certain
"squiggle" is assigned to a particular key stroke, with the squiggle being
drawn in the lower half of the grid space when the lower case key is used, and
in the upper half of the grid space when the upper case version is used.

You can look at some samples, and instructions (and download the ttf font itself
if you're interested) at <http://fiziwig.com/glyph/fragz01.html>

I call the font Fragmentz (fragz.ttf)

If you can think of any additional squiggles that would be handy, there are LOADS
of unassigned characters in the font, so it has plenty of room for expansion.

--gary

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Ina van der Vegt <gijsstrider@...>