Posted 04/21/2013: (continued from part one)
To demonstrate that these characters really are font based, I’ve added the following to the stylesheet:
p
{
font-family: sloppiestfontinthewest;
font-size: 48px;
letter-spacing: -.4em;
}
The effect of putting the squeeze on the letter spacing can easily be seen in this latest font rendering by the browser. One thing becomes obvious as you hand-create font outlines in SVG. It’s clear that professionally created fonts reuse the SVG (or other) mathematical formulaic biases such that they are applied to every letter within the set. A commonality is thus applied to the entire family – which imbues the family with a solid and consistent look throughout all of the character sets. What we are doing is the hand crafted pottery version of a font, where the consistency depends upon our ability to draw in the SVG editor.
Some font makers claim to hand craft their fonts, and to these people my hat comes off. Hand crafting each glyph must be a time consuming affair, to say the least. A down-home, hand crafted look may be perfect in many circumstances, just as it can be with pottery. The commercial/industrial approach would apply the language of mathematics that best described all the common lines and curves of the entire font family.
The tweaking of fonts in the just mentioned “commercial/industrial” way might make a graphics oriented mathematics major of the font-maker. That’s not a bad thing, but then there is the WYSIWYG-SVG editor for everybody else.
Continue to page three : https://ronaldscheckelhoff.wordpress.com/lets-make-a-font-3/
Musings 