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

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