From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Wed Dec 03 2003 - 08:17:25 EST
Michael Everson writes:
> John Hudson wrote:
> > Michael Everson wrote:
> > >Philippe Verdy wrote:
> > > > Such a font seems easy to create automatically by using the
> > > > basic glyphs of a base font containing the ASCII letters and
> > > > digits, and a source text file giving the name and range of
> > > > Unicode code point blocks, as well as a representative
> > > > character or string.
> > >
> > > You don't know much about drawing fonts, evidently.
> >
> >To be fair to Philippe, what he suggests isn't too far beyond what
> >is currently possible with the latest generation of
> >Python-scriptable font tools.
>
> If you say so. I find that I cannot imagine how I would have drawn
> the glyphs by some automated process.
Why that? Couldn't most of the LastResort glyphs be generated in a
a SVG-like vector format, using glyphs found in other fonts, plus
very few specific glyphs that need handdrawing ?
It seems clear to me that most of these glyphs are composed from
other glyphs that could have been borrowed from other fonts. This
allows then to generate the needed collection of glyphs, assigned
a name formed automatically with the Unicode block name, before
compiling them in a TrueType file where the cmap will also be
script-generated from the UCD properties.
So the effective set of SVG glyph designs that need to be manually
created seems small for me: you need two rounded boxes to create
the border, and a few specific variants for the internal area of
the glyph used to represent non-characters.
Using script languages (inclusing Korn Shell or JavaScript) to
generate a font is not ridiculous for me, as it helps maintaining
the font design consistently without forgetting cases. These
scripts are part of the manual design, but they don't necessarily
need drawing abilities (however it requires knowledge of the data
tables needed to create a fully functional font). You don't need
to publish these scripts, but they are certainly good tools that
a typographer could ask to a programmer.
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