Re: Tinkerfont - Any con-alphabet you want it to be

On Tuesday, February 22, 2005 10:33 PM, Gary Shannon wrote:


> Tinkerfont
>
> I was building a font for my silent con sign language
> by grabing bitmap pictures of the letters from the
> Times New Roman font and cutting and pasting bits and
> pieces, like bodies, ascenders and descenders, serifs,
> etc., and reassembling those pieces into new
> characters.  Then I thought I would use a font utility
> to turn my bitmap pictures into a real ttf font.
>
> Then it occured to me that it would be neat to have
> what I'm calling a "tinker toy font", or "tinkerfont"
> where each ASCII letter on the keyboard would not
> represent a whole character, but only some piece of
> the character.  For example, suppose "A" in the
> tinkerfont drew a left-side vertical ascender, while
> "D" drew a right-side hooked descender, and "o" drew a
> circular body while "k" drew a 'u' shaped body.  Now a
> Roman lower case 'b' could be drawn by typing the
> letter group "Ao ".  "A" would cause the ascender to
> be drawn and "o" would draw the circular body attached
> to that ascender.  The space indicates that the letter
> is complete and would move to the next letter.
> Likewise, the lower case Roman 'g' would be typed as
> "Bo ".
>
> Now it seems like a real waste to have to use two or
> three letters to represent one character of the
> alphabet, however, using these bits and pieces they
> could be combined in many new and original ways making
> it possible to print literally tens of thousands of
> unique symbols with only one font.  Anyone who wanted
> to invent their own alphabet for their favorite
> conlang could use the tinkerfont and just discover new
> combinations of the existing ascenders, descenders,
> body shapes and diacritics.
>
> The tinkerfont would not be capable of displaying
> every possible written character, but it would give
> conlangers a huge selection of ways to create new
> characters. PLUS, conlangers could share their
> alphabets with each other without having to download a
> zillion different fonts.  The single tinkerfont would
> be all you'd need.  Then to share your alphabet you'd
> simply share the letter groups it took to draw each
> character of that alphabet.
>
> There are some very preliminary samples here:
> http:fiziwig.com/tinker.html
>
>
As I see it, you have two possibilities.

You can make a "monospace" font in which each character component is always
at the same place. In this case your possibilities are rather limited.

You can also make a "proportional" font with OpenType features which say how
the character components must be combined. Since the softwares which can
correctly handle OpenType fonts are usually Unicode compliant, you could
make a Unicode font with your own character components in the private use
area. That way you would not be limited to 52 componants, but don't forget
to allow your character components to be combined with already existing
characters: that could reduce the size of your text files.


JF

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