On Sun, 16 Apr 2017 16:23:52 -0700 (MST), you wrote:
>It's a fan alphabet, largely gleaned from the Hobbit. You can see two such
>alphabets I'm thinking of doing
><
http://wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/Runic_Alphabet> .
>I'm not surprised to hear that the descenders would be irrelevant, since
>there is only a single case, but why not the ascenders? I would think that
>the ascenders and the baselines would be the only relevant horizontal guide.
>So the left and the right borders dictate the entire horizontal spacing
>between the letters (at the software's discretion)?
>How about I show you a sample of another fanboy's rendering and you can give
>me an opinion on how correct he was? I found the subtleties given in the
>books I was looking at suggest that I don't really have an eye for this sort
>of thing.
><
http://fontforge.10959.n7.nabble.com/file/n15462/quick_brown_runes.png>
"Ascender" refers to a stroke that goes up further than the other
strokes in the character, so h has an ascender, as does b, f, l,
etc., because, in general, most lower-case letters are shorter.
They're called ascenders because they rise above the general
height.
Most alphabets want "air" at the sides, the rule for Latin- and
Kyrillic-based charsets being that the space between letters
should be about the same as the space inside them. Blackletter
came about in part because parchment (the prepared skin of a
sheep or lamb) and vellum (ditto of a cow or calf, sometimes even
a calf foetus) was, and is, *expensive*, and so to get the most
out of each skin, the scribes gradually compressed the letters
til there were no more curves at all, just angles. Which is what
runic writers did too. They wrote with the barest minimum of air
between the chars and between the lines. The other reason for
the compression is that it's decorative--it creates a visual mass
that's pattern-like.
So in fontforge, if you want to be traditional (you might not --
Tolkien wasn't, in the texts accompanying his Middle Earth
stories), out of your nominal 1000 pixel height try leaving 5
pixels air at the top, and maybe 20 at the bottom, with a
horizontal 1-pixel line at 10 from the bottom. And leave maybe
10 pixels at the sides. Do 3 or 4 runes and try them out at
various point sizes, see whether, when printing at the smallest
readable size (8 to 12 points, depending on the readers) the air
you've left is enough to be easily visible but not "wasteful". If
you want to be fancier, put a line at top and bottom, and leave
maybe 20 pixels under the bottom line to create stripes of runes.
The ones at that nabble.com url look like they're meant to be
brush-written (the pointy trail-offs give it away). Probably not
a lot of runes were ever written with a brush in real life. They
tended to be incised because runes were important and not to be
used trivially.
For the few documents they ever created, they used pretty much
the same reed pen as other scribes did at the time, sometimes cut
but probably more often just mashed a little to act like a very
blunt brush and produce a stroke of even weight regardless of
direction (that's what the Egyptians did, too). By the time
their culture had changed such that portable records were needed,
Scandinavian-Latin charsets were used, not runes.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most
engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org!
http://sdm.link/slashdot_______________________________________________
fontforge-users mailing list
[hidden email]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fontforge-usershttp://fontforge.10959.n7.nabble.com/User-f8781.html
Locked
