About My Fonts - And about me - a little OT - Update.

Hi Guys -
Just wanted to let you know that I'm still around. Been poking around looking for materials to make fonts with, and I am also getting things wrapped up to go on vacation in June. Sun and relaxation - yes, getting dragged around through amusement parks that are larger than the state of Rhode Island, YUCK! Lol:>

I have made the decision that for public safety considerations, and to prevent mass blindness and causing psychological trauma to innocent bystanders - I will swim this year in a giant baggy, dark or gray Tshirt and knee length olive drab green shorts (Safari style with the hammer pockets), maybe socks to, and skip the trunks, lol. Don't want to risk being featured on "Fact Or Faked - Paranormal Files", or being captured by a Cryptozooligist.

I have been getting a lot of inspiration lately, and I was thinking about taking some photos of the Fort at Saint Augustine this year and posting them for an inspirational thread - but I'm not sure if that would qaulify as a "Castle" or not. I don't really know how "period proper" that would be. I don't know - maybe I'll take a few shots of the Lighthouse down there, and stop off at Coral Castle and take some snap shots over there if I can get around to it. Coral Castle is a very interesting place that might be useful for fortress, temple, and dungeon mapping inspiration. It has a very primitive construction method and the sculptures are what I might describe as bizarre enough to be interesting. My sister wants to drag me across "Harry Potter Land", so I could take some photos over there for architectural reference.

Oh well - still wanted to let you guys know that I'm around, and will be posting freebies and such as I make them.

Back to the fonts - more important here - If anybody can point me to links to public domain letter specimen images, or if you have an old type specimen sheet, or an old book page with a complete alphabet, preferrably that pre-dates 1927, and you could scan that - save it as a .png - and post it in a zip - that would be much appreciated to. I specifically need old letter alphabet images that would look good on a map or map cartouche. I have been collecting as much stuff as I can and the specimen folders are getting pretty chunky. Any information about free sources to alphabet images that I can "fontalize" would be appreciated.

Comments

  • I'm not sure whether this works for inspiration, but take a look at the "Voynich Manuscript" -- google has a lot of images. It's a single manuscript, first mentioned in the early 17th century, but believed to be older. It's written in code that has not been deciphered

    I think you can get a pdf here: http://archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript
    And wikipedia has an extensive article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript

    It would make for interesting mystery notes on a page, but I'm not sure how you could make it a font. But if anyone can do it, you can!

    Steve
  • edited May 2012
    Actually Steve I could make it into a font:

    #1,First you take a page of it that you nab off the net - and using microsoft pant - you crop out specific symbols, copy them - and save them in a new paint image that's blank - so that you can arrage the symbols on the new blank image into a "Master Sheet".

    #2, Next - you open your "Master Sheet" in inkscape and do a "Bitmap Trace", so that what you have is a plain black and white sheet with the symbols better defined. You save that as a "Cairo .PNG" after deleting out of your inkscape workspace the original layer.

    #3, Next - you open your .png in Paint again - and you crop out your individual symbols and save each one seperately as a new 24 bit .bmp into a new desktop folder.

    #4, You then import those images into your font editor into their appropriate character map sections - and do an autotrace on each one to turn'em into glyphs.

    #5, you then tweak, edit, etc. until you've got a new font!

    I may do a Voynich font - it does seem to be an interesting idea.

    One theory about the Voynich book is that it's a "con prop", it's a fake book proporting to hold forbidden knowledge that somebody would create in order to sell it to a gullable aristocrat or academian for a fortune - when it's really nothing but nonsense. They did a special on it on the History Channel a while back - and they said that similiar frauds were pretty common during the rennaisance and pre-rennaisance eras.
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