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Font editing for adding eo diacritics?

by Durandal1717, April 15, 2010

Messages: 8

Language: English

Durandal1717 (User's profile) April 15, 2010, 5:28:52 AM

I was recently thinking about buying a font I think Esperanto would look good in, however like most fonts, it only has a rather rudimentary set of Latin characters, and certainly not the Eo-specific ones. However, it does have standalone circumflexes and breves, and I was wondering if anyone knew if there are any font editing programs that will allow you to more or less copy and paste the appropriate characters to allow proper rendering of Esperanto.

Thanks!

3rdblade (User's profile) April 15, 2010, 6:35:06 AM

Fontforge is pretty good, and it's freeware. It helps if you have Adobe Illustrator or something similar to do the cutting and pasting you described, then importing the new characters to Fontforge, but I believe all the work can be done in Fontforge.

http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/

erinja (User's profile) April 15, 2010, 3:13:38 PM

There is a lernu! user who has his own business designing fonts, and many of them have Esperanto letters included (plus Greek, Cyrillic, etc). If you like one of his fonts, buying one of his could be an option to improvising your own. It would probably look nicer as well, since a well-designed letter is more than just a letter with a ^ pasted on.

The user is tipodesegnisto, his website is http://castletype.com

darkweasel (User's profile) April 15, 2010, 3:23:00 PM

3rdblade:It helps if you have Adobe Illustrator or something similar
Inkscape is a freeware and free software alternative to the expensive non-free Adobe Illustrator!

Durandal1717 (User's profile) April 15, 2010, 7:27:19 PM

Thanks for all the responses, I downloaded FontForge and am giving that a shot. But oh my god who would've known it'd be so complicated.

To anyone who's used FontForge, do you know if there's a simple way to simply position glyphs by hand instead of entering a series of x,y transformation coordinates? I swear I managed to do it by accident once, and for the life of me I can't seem to be able to do it again.

3rdblade (User's profile) April 15, 2010, 11:23:30 PM

To anyone who's used FontForge, do you know if there's a simple way to simply position glyphs by hand instead of entering a series of x,y transformation coordinates? I swear I managed to do it by accident once, and for the life of me I can't seem to be able to do it again.
Fontforge is daunting. If you are using a PC there are one or two free fontmakers that may have a slightly easier interface. There is a way to position the glyphs by hand, but I took the easy way out when I used Fontforge, converted the graphics to vectors using Illustrator (try Inkscape - thankyou darkweasael!) then put them back into Fontforge, which will then do all the x,y coordinates automatically.

I blogged about using Fontforge. It's not quite what you're doing but it might give some more insight.

Durandal1717 (User's profile) April 16, 2010, 4:56:18 AM

Thanks for the help everyone, I finished it. You can see a sample here:
http://img42.imageshack.us/img42/9141/kasildaaka...

It was hard to get the gist of, but FontForge seems like a really useful tool.

3rdblade (User's profile) April 16, 2010, 7:35:42 AM

Looks good rideto.gif

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