New LGPL font: Essays 1743 1.0

It's not only the GPL. Those freeware fonts often don't have complete character sets, worse even than the lack of umlauts, and no bold, italic or bold-italic variants. Most of them aren't body fonts, and their quality and usability is questionable. It would be nice to have some more high quality fonts made (or free'ed up), like the Bitstream Vera initiative.

I think it would be a lot of work to take one of these free fonts and transform them into something that has a pretty complete character set. Which program do you use for that?

Get it here: http://fontforge.sourceforge.net

It's a pretty nice tool. It uses its own widget set, so the look doesn't fit right in, but it's quite easy to use and the main developer is quite fast with fixes.

but few of them are non-gpl and therefore
err...few of them are gpl I mean.
Sorry!
- Andreas

Yeah, I think so too, opensource users could use some more body fonts instead of too corroded or header-oriented fonts. Ofcourse, I presume very readable and usable fonts are more boring to make than a more graphically creative typeface.

Ofcourse, it's not your (original posters') job to make these fonts. It's really great that someone makes a font with a complete character set, and also the bold, italic and bold-italic versions, so as to have a complete font family.

Is it hard to make a font? I've always liked Chanticleer Roman (free), but it doesn't have a bold, italic or bold-italic version. And ofcourse the more-or-less similar commercial variant, "Golden Cockerel", is overly expensive for an individual... Fonts are rip-off, if they would be cheaper, more people would buy them.

Of course, I presume very readable and usable fonts are more boring to make than a more graphically creative typeface.

It's not so much that; it's the fact that I specifically wanted to make a font that looked like it was printed in the 18th century. For that purpose, this is a very usable font. Similarly, my earlier font, Isabella, was meant to look like a certain calligraphic hand from the Renaissance (a relatively readable one, as such things go), for use in creating documents with a Renaissance feel, not for, say, business memos. For that, we have URW. :-)

Ofcourse, it's not your (original posters') job to make these fonts.

Right. I'm exploiting the fact that I'm in a relatively rare overlap: I have enough geekery to make a font, and interest in doing FOSS stuff, and skill at calligraphy. (OK, so this one didn't involve calligraphy.) Anybody with the first two could create an LGPL font; but only someone with all three is going to create an LGPL font based on a medieval hand.

It's really great that someone makes a font with a complete character set, and also the bold, italic and bold-italic versions, so as to have a complete font family.

Thanks!

Is it hard to make a font? I've always liked Chanticleer Roman (free), but it doesn't have a bold, italic or bold-italic version.

Well, for the most part, it's just like any other vector-based drawing program. If you're starting from scratch, it can take a lot of skill to do something good (which is why I take a real-world sample and scan it in). Creating a bold version is actually pretty easy; with FontForge, there's an "Expand" command (I think) which takes a glyph and makes it thicker. You need to tweak it to make it Look Right, of course.

Creating an italic version (not just a slanted form, as early versions of the Mac used to do) is nontrivial; done right, it's basically a completely new font that just happens to look somewhat like the non-italic form. I was able to do this one only because the book I was working from used a lot of italics.

--John Stracke

Thanks for your answer. I've always been interested in fonts and once tried to make one - I even had a pretty good idea about the style - but after seeing all those hundreds of empty squares, I suddenly got very, very tired. It's a lot of work, and takes a lot of practice and skill.

So I didn't get very far. I had an 'a' and a 'b', but they weren't even readable, let alone looking like what I had in mind. :)

It looks wonderful, it's an amazing work indeed :-O

Thanks so much for your contribution. I can only hope more artist become involved with open source projects.