A Great Book about Fonts

Oregonian · **Posted:** Wed Sep 14, 2011 7:23 pm **(#1)**

Just My Type by Simon Garfield. It's available on Amazon.com if you are interested. You can read the NY Times review of it here.

I haven't finished it yet but it's a veritable historical treasure trove about fonts. I am enjoying it immensely.

An entire chapter is dedicated to the ampersand. A t-shirt with that same ampersand is available at MyFonts.

The finest ampersand cut by William Caslon, is still alive after almost three hundred years, and it has many impersonators but no equals. It is fiendishly difficult to draw, and when done badly may resemble aimless scribble. But when done well, it can be a work of wild freehand art in a way that few regular characters are allowed to be. ...
Just My Type, by Simon Garfield, Gotham Books, p 90.

Caslon Ampersand on tee.

mahvin · **Joined:** Oct 06, 2010 **Posts:** 4050

Does it cover the history of hand to type, like Olde English calligraphy?

tstandiford · **Posted:** Wed Sep 14, 2011 9:36 pm **(#3)**

Cool! thanks for mentioning it. I'll have to snag it.

Rod · **Joined:** May 16, 2010 **Posts:** 14735 **Location:** USA

I was thinking about getting into font creation using Inkscape.

Looks like a great book to check out.I wonder if the library has it?

Oregonian · **Posted:** Wed Sep 14, 2011 10:23 pm **(#5)**

mahvin wrote:

Does it cover the history of hand to type, like Olde English calligraphy?

Earliest type is Gutenberg's Bible, in 1454. It talks about the development of fonts and is more chronologically connected with the 19th century on up to now.

I'm about halfway through the book. There may be more old stuff farther along.

Rod wrote:

Looks like a great book to check out.I wonder if the library has it?

It was published the first of September of this year. You could probably check with your library.

tstandiford · **Posted:** Thu Sep 15, 2011 4:57 am **(#6)**

Oregonian wrote:

mahvin wrote:

Does it cover the history of hand to type, like Olde English calligraphy?

Earliest type is Gutenberg's Bible, in 1454. It talks about the development of fonts and is more chronologically connected with the 19th century on up to now.

I'm about halfway through the book. There may be more old stuff farther along.

Rod wrote:

Looks like a great book to check out.I wonder if the library has it?

It was published the first of September of this year. You could probably check with your library.

Good thought! I always forget that you don't have to buy the book.

Draconian · **Posted:** Thu Sep 15, 2011 10:15 am **(#7)**

Rod wrote:

I was thinking about getting into font creation using Inkscape.

Looks like a great book to check out.I wonder if the library has it?

Whoa! I didn't know you could make fonts in Inkscape. Will it export a ttf file? i though you had to have something like fontforge to do that.

Oregonian · **Posted:** Thu Sep 15, 2011 10:53 am **(#8)**

Draconian wrote:

Whoa! I didn't know you could make fonts in Inkscape. Will it export a ttf file?

Not quite. You can create your glyphs in Inkscape and import to Font Forge. Check here.

By the way, the book mentions the film, Helvetica, which is an interesting documentary about the Helvetica font. Had me looking at all of my packages, etc. It's EVERYWHERE! I don't have the Helvetica font but Arial is Microsoft's answer to it and it is a close second.

You can download the film here. Right-click the download button and save it to your hard drive.

Rod · **Joined:** May 16, 2010 **Posts:** 14735 **Location:** USA

There is also on online font convertor for Glyphs created in Inkscape here.
http://onlinefontconverter.com/

Rod · **Joined:** May 16, 2010 **Posts:** 14735 **Location:** USA

Go to text/Glyphs

And Inkscape opens this font editor for glyph creation.

More info here ... http://cleversomeday.wordpress.com/2010 ... ape-dings/
Your dingbats can be numbers and/or text.Just a heads up.

Rod · **Joined:** May 16, 2010 **Posts:** 14735 **Location:** USA

For truetype output, you could make your letters as separate SVG files,
and use python (with the fontforge module) to create a TTF from them.

1 Hot Sketch · **Joined:** Sep 26, 2011 **Posts:** 5

There's also this awesome site run by a computer science professor in Canada, which he calls On Snot and Fonts. :hehe

Silly name, I know (and not sure why he calls it that), but the site is anything but frivolous. HUGE resource for downloading fonts as well as the history of individual typefaces, designers, and info about the font "scene" that is part of some countries' art movements. In places like Germany and Japan font/graphic designers are like rock stars.

:paint

Also categorizes them by genre, depending on what you're looking for: Dingbats, (sans-)serifs, script/cursive, typewriter, etc. There are even sections for non-alphabetical pseudo-systems like Klingon, Tengwar/Elvish, Runes, Esoteric/Astrological, The Matrix, etc...

:geek

Oh, and the site author claims that his funny-looking favicon is a drunken moose or something, which Canada has a lot of, apparently. (Meanwhile, the U.S. is worried that we might have one from Alaska running for President, doncha know. :lol

Not to mention all the other dingbats in the running as of late.) :rofl

http://cg.scs.carleton.ca/~luc/fonts.html

Oregonian · **Posted:** Mon Sep 26, 2011 9:37 pm **(#13)**

1 Hot Sketch wrote:

[font=Arial][size=85]There's also this awesome site run by a computer science professor in Canada, which he calls On Snot and Fonts. :hehe

What a site! A person could literally spend days in there and never see it all.

Thanks 1 Hot Sketch, nice find! :bigthup

Draconian · **Posted:** Tue Sep 27, 2011 6:42 am **(#14)**

Thanks Rod. I checked out the site and some of the links therein. I bookmarked the converter site and downloaded the pdf. Looks like the next rainy day is Inkscape & font day. Really appreciate you going the extra step on this. :mcof

1Hotsketch -great site! Molly's gonna love this site.

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