Saturday, November 29, 2014

Making & Using WebFonts: Software

Gutenberg Printing Press circa 1450

WORK IN PROGRESS! I JUST REALLY NEED A BREAK. UPDATE TO COME SOON

Making & Using WebFonts aka. Typeface, Typeset, Lettertypen, Fuentes, 字体

Let's talk about fonts. If you don't know what a font is, then likely this article is not for you. From the age of the Gutenberg Printing Press around 1450 (image), setting the type for printing became an art in the west.

There are a number of reasons why you just might wish to make your own font. First of all, you would not have to worry about the costs for personal use, or maybe you would like to sell your own fonts. Take the Centaur font for example. It was drawn by Bruce Rogers in 1914 for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and was based on Nicolas Jenson's cuttings in the fifteenth century. The typeset still fetches from €34 or USD $44 for local usage (meaning in a format for use on your own computer) to €345 or USD $440 for use on Apps and Cloud distribution.

History: Once again the Chinese were first.

The world's first known movable type printing technology was invented and developed in China by the Han Chinese printer Bi Sheng between the years 1041 and 1048. When this technology spread to Korea during the Goryeo Dynasty in 1234, they made the world's first metal movable-type system for printing.This led to the printing of the Jikji in 1377, the oldest extant movable metal print book. This form of metal movable type that has been described by the French scholar Henri-Jean Martin as 'extremely similar to Gutenberg's'.


Korean movable type from 1377 used for the Jikji

Sure, there are free fonts out there as well. Maybe you're not interested in trying to compete in that market, but you have a project that requires something unique, or a company logo that needs just that extra touch. This is when you might wish to venture off into the world of typography and create your own. Let us take a look at software that will allow us to "cut" our own typeface.

Fi Ligature Cut as a Movable Font

Font Editor Software

FontLab Studio, one of the industry's standards is priced over €482 (USD $600, SGD $782, CNY ¥3686). Now if you intend to start a professional font foundries, which make a business designing and selling fonts, you just might be happy enough to foot the bill for the sticker price. For many of us with less demands and planned use, the cost is far too high.

Earlier I mentioned that there are a number of free options out there. Many of these choices are going to be rudimentary.

With these tools, don't expect to create high quality professional fonts right from the start — it will take time and practice, just like with any endeavor. But, if you're simply looking to create a custom font or would like to try your hand at a fun, fulfilling and creative activity like font design, these tools will certainly help you get the job done.

Let us cover some these free software options after a brief jaunt over typography jargon.

Glyph /ˈɡlɪf/ An elemental symbol within an agreed set of symbols, intended to represent a readable character for the purposes of writing and thereby expressing thoughts, ideas and concepts.
Sinograph or Sinogram is a Chinese character (Hanzi), especially when used in a different language, such as Japanese (Kanji), Korean (Hanja) or Vietnamese (Hantu).
Diacritics are the signs, such as an accent or cedilla, which when written above or below a letter indicates a difference in pronunciation from the same letter when unmarked or differently marked.

Font Editor Software:

⇓ links to in-line notes

Related Software:

  • Inkscape for vector editing (e.g. SVG file format). ★★★★☆

FontStruct
FontStruct.com is a web based font editor. They do require that you have an account in order to use their free creation services. FontStruct sells over 10,000 typesets from various professional font foundries and also has a number of royalty free fonts. The free fonts you are welcome to download, or clone directly into the editor for your personal modifications. They provide an informative blog, live users' news-feed and have their own online shop. Copyright over fonts created with FontStruct belong to the creators, not to FontStruct.

GFE
GNU Font Editor (GFE) is a graphical font editor based on the GIMP Toolkit. It is easy to use and was intended to support many font types, but stopped with support for only BDF font files, which can still be converted to many other formats. Since the advent of FontForge, GFE has been decommissioned. The software is still available via CVS.

FontForge
FontForge on GitHub is another free font editor, and it has a wonderful environment in which you are able to work with vectors. This is so much easier when editing a font as compared to dealing with pixels in a bitmap.
It is available for Linux, Windows and of course Mac.
Documentation is available in English and Mandarin Chinese (简体中文版). It is very comprehensive and even goes so far as to explain how to design Devanagari typefaces (an abugida alphabet of India and Nepal) and how to add glyphs to Arabic fonts.
You can import EPS and SVG vector files from programs such as the free vector image editor Inkscape and Adobe Illustrator et cetera.


DoubleType
DoubleType, last updated on 2013-04-17, is a downloadable font editor (type designer) that builds TrueType font files. Thanks to Java, it runs on Windows, Linux, & Mac. Glyphs are stored in XML based file to aid teamwork. Efficient glyph design by combining existing glyphs and modules. Users claim that it only supports .glyph files, not import of nor export of TrueType, which would require another program to do the translation.

Horus
I personally would advise you to skip this utility, as I could not find anything useful about it. Apparently, some good ground work was coded by Alessandro Crugnola, and rendered inside of Adobe's Flex web front-end environment. You can't edit font, you can't load a font, it is just a viewer for demonstration sake. Perhaps they make the libraries available, which I would assume are written in Python and Adobe's ActionScript.
For the sake of research, Crungnola now works in N.Y.C. for Aviary, a company that joined Adobe with their photo-editor App on iOS and Android, also released Horus.
Before clicking the link, please note that it is very rudimentary and actually requires a little instruction, which is not available on the direct link for the online web application. "You can see the rough results of our team's Flex experiment into parsing fonts into outlines. (Open a font from the top File menu and then drill down into and enter the glyph folder to select and play with the shapes)."

Bitmap Font Editor
Perhaps an excellent program to fork from GitHub and improve for your personal JAVA-based typographical needs. This is a small font editor for bitmap fonts. Kostas "Bad Sector" Michalopoulos originally used this code for a Flash game font developments. The downloadable code is licensed under zlib license terms. It was written in Java using NetBeans.

iFontMaker™
iFontMaker™ is targeted for the pad market. It is available for both Windows 8 interface (USD $4.99, 0.2 Mb) and iPad (USD $6.99, 0.3 Mb) by Eiji Nishidai with Pentacom, Japan.
iFontMaker™ claims to be the first font editor exclusive for iPad. Features include; rich textured brushes, support for pressure sensitive pen tablets, an online gallery, to ability to email the typography or convert it into a web font or a TrueType Font (TTF) file, which many Font Editors can import and which is commonly used on Windows platforms.
For information on how to install your own font on iOS7 device click the previous link, or take the scenic route via the App's 2ttf.com page.


iFontMaker Windows 8 Edition


iFontMaker iPad Edition


BitFontMaker2™
BitFontMaker2™ is a second version of Pentacom, Japan's online font-editor. Browser requirements are IE 9+, Firefox 2+, Chrome, Safari 5+ and/or Mobile Safari on iPad iOS5+.
Copyright can be set to PublicDomain, CC-BY, CC-NC or AllRightsReserved if you wish to share your font on the BitFontMaker Gallery. Brief but handy bilingual instructions (つかいかた) are available online.
One can import a True Type Font (TTF) from your local drive; however, this web-interface only handles a 16 x 16 pixel grid. The import/export function is done through an editable Javascript text object. Even with fine tuning, you will likely loose definition, and end up with a font that looks good on an Atari emulator. If you love nostalgia, there is always the original online BitFontMaker.

Custom iOS Fonts
Yet another gift from Pentacom, Japan. Custom iOS Fonts is fast and dirty hack for turning your local TTF or OTF font files into installable iOS .mobileconfig files. Upload your font, it gets converted, repackaged and downloads almost instantly. Just mail it to yourself and open it on your iPhone or iPad to install.




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