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

----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Bennett" <paul-bennett@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Friday, October 14, 2005 3:03 AM
Subject: Re: A single font can display ANY alphabet, pictograph, or rune


> On Thu, 13 Oct 2005 20:31:06 -0400, tomhchappell <tomhchappell@...>
> wrote:
>
>> To a program like Gary's, with a Master Grid (perhaps one with 100
>> points instead of just 25 -- each point specified by a digit-pair
>> instead of a letter) and your choice of size-orientation-and-shape of
>> pen-point, add the production of Bezier curves, with the quantization
>> requirement that each end-point and/or control-point must be one of
>> the points of the Master Grid.
>>
>> That sounds, to me, so far, like it would have given me what I'd
>> wanted, if I'd been smart enough to program it in the first place.
>
> Of course, once you get into a system that complex, you're verging on
> reinventing METAFONT, which might be more advisble if your needs are that
> complex.
Of course METAFONT is the best tool for the design of characters but it is
not available on many computers outside the TEX community and it is not
really easy to use when you don't know it.
Is there already a working version of MetaType somewhere? That would allow
to make new TrueType fonts using the METAFONT language.
The main advantages of TinkerFont is that it can be used efficiently after a
few minutes and that your correspondents can see texts in your new scripts
without having to install new fonts every time. Characters drawn with
TinkerFont are only approximations of the real characters and you can use
GIF files in your Web Pages. But Are GIF files allowed on this list?

JF

PS. Gary's program is very nice, but the 25 nodes matrix is insufficient and
the characters cannot be converted into a TrueType Font.