Re: medieval font design

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

Till Rettig escreveu:
> I am slowly evolving in my ideas and trials on the "ancient" fonts for
> lilypond. So far I have a couple of good scans from which I would like
> to take the shapes. But how is the best to get them into metafont? I
> found something about mfpic (probably not good in this case), fig2mf
> (sounds already better) and ps2mf (this might be the best?). But are
> they good, can they do the job? I am so far imaginating that I would
> take the scans as a picture and then kind of draw around them inside of
> a vector programm. This would give them at least a really "handwritten"

I simply used pencil and paper, drawing by hand, and guessing control 
points. Then, a lot of tweaking makes the glyph look OK. 
Although this is harder at first, it makes a more logical to design
a true MetaFont, one whose parameters (eg. thickness) can be varied 
continuously. 

> lining. The other idea that somehow sounded logical to me was the way
> suggested in the fontforge tutorial: designing a glyph by setting points
> at the outline of the glyph until there are enough points to describe
> the form. But how is this done for instance in xfig? (As far as I
> understand fontforge doesn't export to fm).

You could trace the scans, and then Simplify the curve, and use that 
as a starting point for the meta font. 

> I acknowleged the fact that I will have to learn something about
> metafont anyways, I thought I would go through the metafont tutorial by
> Christophe Grandsire, this is old but since the program seems to be the
> same... 

I simply read the mfbook cover to cover. It's available online, BTW.


> Then about the single parts of the font (now for some white and black
> mensural notation): I will create noteheads and stems extra, but since
> the stems in some cases will have a form like the stem from the ! sign
> (bigger at top), they won't fit together with the flags. So should there
> be a separate flag + stem or rather a stem-flag combination?

I don't understand this question.

> And still the idea about introducing some variability to mimick the
> handscribe, that is to have about four or five slightly different glyphs
> that would be used in arbitrary order. Is something like this possible
> in lilypond?

it's possible, but I think it's not a good idea. If you want things to look
crummy, you can always write them by hand?  

-- 

Han-Wen Nienhuys - address@hidden - http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen

LilyPond Software Design
 -- Code for Music Notation
http://www.lilypond-design.com