Re: A single font can display ANY alphabet, pictograph, or rune

----- Original Message -----
From: "Gary Shannon" <fiziwig@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Saturday, October 08, 2005 10:00 PM
Subject: A single font can display ANY alphabet, pictograph, or rune


> Well, almost any.
>
> Returning to the list after an absence of a few
> months, to share an idea I've toyed with off and on
> for a couple of years: The idea that a single font
> could be designed that could be used to display and
> print a huge variety of alphabetic characters,
> syllabaries, pictographs, runes, petroglyphs,
> hieroglyphs, and squiggles.
>
> With such a "universal" font you could invent your own
> writing system for you conlang and would not need to
> create a font for it, because the "tinker toy font"
> would have all the pieces you'd need to display your
> unique writing system. PLUS, your web page, and other
> conlanger's web pages, could display any conlang
> writing system as long as the viewer had the single
> universal Tinker Toy font.
>
> This one single font could display Roman, Greek,
> Devanagari, Korean Hangul, etc. etc.
>
> The simplest version, for runes and crude pictographs
> and alphabets is this one:
> http://fiziwig.com/tinkerfont.html
>
> A more complex, maybe even TOO complex version that
> displays detailed characters is here:
> http://fiziwig.com/tinker.html
>
> I need to find a usable font making program so I can
> try out the simple version and get a feel for how it
> could be improved upon. Maybe the best solution lies
> somewhere between the two extremes in the above two
> links.
>
> --gary
>
Good idea! I'm making a few such fonts right now.

However There's a problem with the Tinker Toy Font.
You wrote: "The space bar advances the cursor two grid positions without
drawing any segments, and would normally be used instead of "a" at the end
of a glpyh." If you add a space after each glyph, the words would be cut
anywhere when they appear at the end of a line, which is not very practical.
IMO it would be better to add one or two "a" after each glyph and a space
only at the end of a word, except when the word is followed by a punctuation
mark (in this case the space would be added after the punctuation).

About the ThinkerFont, I think that 9 cells high glyphs are not convenient
for a script I'm working on and which has ascenders, descenders, diacritics
above and diacritics below. If you accept to use the capital letters, the
small letters and the digits, you'll have a total of 26 + 26 + 10 = 62
strokes, which is sufficient for 15 cells high glyphs.

JF

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