![]() There are a lot of font designers now but there are not so many real professionals in font engineering, it is quite in demand if you want to work for a company. Drawing a font is only half the job. I'm unemployed, so no budget for the commercial tools (yet). x/y coordinates of control points and bezier handles are less than 1mm high and unreadable. The mouse pointer and toolbar icons are about 2 mm square. I'm struggling with FontForge as its interface doesn't scale well onto my 4k monitor. But I just wanted to dive into drawing and that was the only idea I had kicking around that day. Some glyphs were just loosely roughed in (the last 5 diagonals) and there's a ton of adjustments still needed everywhere before it's ready for serious review. It will be a normal text font that doesn't look like it only suits Latin words on handmade paper. I guess it's a revival of sorts but only in the most general of senses. It's that idea I've been working on again this past couple of weeks. One font I remember drawing was initially based on Jensen's letterforms, but discarding some of the very early features that fell out of general type use over the centuries, including those sky high ascenders. Occasionally, I'd run lino's at work to see what things looked like in high res. And I remember buying new toner cartridges for the laser printer every few weeks. I do remember my apartment being wallpapered with large laser printed letters that fit one per page. Screens were really low res back then so printing large letters was the only proofing option. Then after the basic features were established I traced the papers in the font editor. For my own creations, I drew the letter ideas on paper about 1-2 inches high so I could draw a few together and see how the idea carried through. The knock-offs were just traced from enlarged photocopies of whatever fonts they were. I didn't answer the original question from Roel Nieskens about process and fonts. I think that font was called Ruddigore (after a Gilbert & Sullivan panto.) The ad agency kerned it to death. I did find a sample of a marketing piece produced by an ad agency for our Provincial lottery corp. I have nothing material left from that period. ![]() ![]() I continued on in prepress and eventually transitioned into IT because I was the only one in the company that fix the computers and network. Gregg eventually moved across the country and I never heard from him again. So we shut it down and went about our lives. And one day I discovered practically all of the fonts on a CD (floppy disk?) of free shareware being sold for like $10. It all ended when Atari ST sales petered out. There was no Unicode and our character set was minimal, though I do recall creating diacritics and ligatures. They were mostly knock-offs, to fill in obvious gaps in font availability in the Calamus market, but I did create a few of my own later on. We started Cherry Fonts and sold the fonts in family packs for $49 ea. So I used Genus to draw fonts for Calamus, which was a German originated 'high end' DTP application. And I used to have a giant old ATF type catalog from around 1920 that I used to stare at for hours. I still have original Goudy specimen books, an early page of The Times (London) showing Stanley Morison's new typeface. I was a bit of type design nut and over time collected a few historic specimen samples to study. Hinting was everything back then because everyone used 300 DPI laser printers and only Adobe's fonts printed nicely at that resolution. But there was no hinting and Adobe's Type 1 format was still a closely guarded secret. I can't remember if the font data structure was available (Adobe Type 3 maybe) or whether he reverse engineered a proprietary format. Somehow that lead to Gregg creating Genus, the font editor for Calamus. ![]() Gregg was more interested in programming, using GFA Basic, a procedural language, and I was more interested in type design. We both had Atari STs at home for hobby hacking. I worked in prepress back then, at large graphics/film/lino production house, and was friends with our creative director, Gregg Rogers. Okay, well, my memory is horrible so I'll try to piece it together from the fragments I can retrieve.
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