More new fonts
Posted: 02 Oct 2006 17:30
I've played with replacing the stock TTD fonts with something that's a little more pleasing to my eye. At the same time, it was my goal to make them Unicode compatible, so they can also be used with foreign language sets.
Initially it is my intention to make the fonts containt all the characters up to U+017F with a few useful extras. In addition to that, I'm willing to add, upon request, additional symbols (for example cyrillic and greek alphabets are feasible to do).
First I've replaced the medium font with 10pt Tahoma Bold, only to later find that's what Andrex used for his newfonts. Never mind, this way I'm able to extend the font with extra glyphs, which is something Wile E.Coyote really wanted me to do. In it's current incarnation, the font supports all the characters up to U+017F (exception being U+AA, U+AC, U+AF, U+B4-U+B8, U+BC and U+BD which still point to special TTD symbols and U+B9, which is superscript -1 instead of superscript 1).
The original TTD large font is the one I dislike the most. In my opinion, it is unnecessarily too big and rather blocky. Longer texts get broken into too many centered lines, which looks plain ugly. After a lot of searching for a serif font that resembled the large TTD letters, yet looked more subtle and rendered well without aliasing, I've settled for Adobe's Minion Pro SemiBold at 19pts.
The small font is much harder - at 5 pixels height, there's not much that can be done. I've tried to make the characters a little more rounded, as opposed to the square ones in TTD. I've even managed to draw small letters, but unfortunately spacing in some places doesn't allow any space below the letters for symbols like g,j,y, not to mention that the font is rather hard to read. I'll revert back to using large letters instead of small, as TTD already does and see how it looks then.
Here's an example of the difference between the old and new fonts:
minime
Initially it is my intention to make the fonts containt all the characters up to U+017F with a few useful extras. In addition to that, I'm willing to add, upon request, additional symbols (for example cyrillic and greek alphabets are feasible to do).
First I've replaced the medium font with 10pt Tahoma Bold, only to later find that's what Andrex used for his newfonts. Never mind, this way I'm able to extend the font with extra glyphs, which is something Wile E.Coyote really wanted me to do. In it's current incarnation, the font supports all the characters up to U+017F (exception being U+AA, U+AC, U+AF, U+B4-U+B8, U+BC and U+BD which still point to special TTD symbols and U+B9, which is superscript -1 instead of superscript 1).
The original TTD large font is the one I dislike the most. In my opinion, it is unnecessarily too big and rather blocky. Longer texts get broken into too many centered lines, which looks plain ugly. After a lot of searching for a serif font that resembled the large TTD letters, yet looked more subtle and rendered well without aliasing, I've settled for Adobe's Minion Pro SemiBold at 19pts.
The small font is much harder - at 5 pixels height, there's not much that can be done. I've tried to make the characters a little more rounded, as opposed to the square ones in TTD. I've even managed to draw small letters, but unfortunately spacing in some places doesn't allow any space below the letters for symbols like g,j,y, not to mention that the font is rather hard to read. I'll revert back to using large letters instead of small, as TTD already does and see how it looks then.
Here's an example of the difference between the old and new fonts:
minime