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

--- Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...> wrote:

> Tinkerfont
>
I can see now that the biggest problem is going to be
selecting the best set of components or "pen strokes"
for building glyphs out of.  By the time I assembled a
set that was able to build duplicates of the Roman
alphabet, the Greek alphabet, and the Cyrillic
alphabet, plus literally millions of other characters
not found in any of those alphabets, I had 140
separate components.  That's a lot more than I was
hoping for.  I had hoped for 52 at most so I could
assign each component to a single upper or lower case
keystroke.

I have another set of 51 components, which fits within
my desired limits, but it's not as versatile.  Right
now I'm writing a short testbed graphics program to
help me visualize how the components fit together.
With that tool I will be able to very quickly asses
different combinations of components and hopefully be
able to find the "best" set of components.

Both sets allow a single letter to be 1, 2, or 3 units
wide so that the resulting alphabet doesn't have to be
fixed pitch with all letters the same width.  It may
even be possible to have letters that are 1.5 or 2.5
units wide.  I'll have to see how that works out.

By sometime next week I hope to have a preliminary
"proof of concept" true type font built that I can
share so anyone who's interested can see how the whole
thing is supposed to work.

--gary

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