So cool! I was wondering where the fonts were, but now I’ve found them on your GitHub repo.
One question/curiosity: is the goal to have a font that looks “consumed by time”? or a font that should look as much as possible as in its original time? I ask this because I notice some final letters have small “ink holes”, they aren’t fully filled.
Ah, difficult, they are two different and incomparable concepts :) As they are now, I think the fonts reach the first goal: give the appearance of an old and used book. Which is cool.
For the second goal maybe there’s no need to go to such lengths as you did, I imagine pictures of how those fonts looked in their time maybe exist(?).
So my plan is (eventually) to add in ligatures where Unicode has defined them - and automatically replace typed text with self-defined ligatures where it doesn't.
Yes, they do. Part of the OpenType standard are the so called “OpenType features” which (amongst other things) allow for contextual alternates, i.e. different kinds of ligatures, and for stylistic alternates, e.g. a slashed zero, a single-storey ɑ, etc. All of these different glyphs are encoded in the font and can be enabled when typesetting using different selectors. This website shows them off.
Some ligatures, like “ffl”, are a separate character in Unicode. Some were added because they can be considered a different character in languages other than English. Some (like “ffl”) were added because of legacy reasons; “no more will be encoded in any circumstances”.
Fantastic project! And thanks for the heads up about the 17th century Dutch fonts - I might consider that for the printed version of my thesis that will probably rot away in the university library anyway. Might as well make it interesting looking.
My favourite project of this kind is TT2020, which takes typewriter imitation to the next level by including irregularities within the font itself. Each (common) glyph has several versions, making the outcome look much more genuine and allowing for the occasional badly printed glyph without making the same error repeat itself to infinity.
It's a bit overkill maybe, but it would absolutely lend itself well to Shakespearian scripts. :)
This is such a great project! I can see how there’s a little room for clean-up on that long S. Plus the comma-looking apostrophe 😵💫. Although maybe that’s how that punctuation mark acted back then?
Thanks :-) It was a couple of days work. Mostly teaching myself stuff that I'd forgotten. I blogged about it so others can follow the process if they want.
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