🎆🎇; Bawr; Cardo

A brief update on my “Pharmacy Deserts” section from yesterday. It turns out Walgreens has a nice, free, legit API for store lookups, so I’ll most certainly be making Friday’s WPE about this.

We’ll keep it short today, as it is a holiday for most 🇺🇸 readers.

🎆🎇

The “Fireworks” font does what it says on the tin. It is made up of a series of fireworks-themed glyphs. The section header shows them all via macOS Sonoma’s Font Book app glyph preview. ‘Tis free to use, and the next section covers how to make your own SVG fonts.

Bawr

Bawr is a Python script that lets you “automate the icons generation from sets of SVG files into fonts and atlases”. It requires both FontForge and Inkscape, both of which are free.

It can:

• Generate TrueType fonts from SVG collections.

• Generate PNG textures from SVG collections.

• Embed binaries into c++ sources ready to link.

• Generate ImGui C++ Font Loaders, C++ Atlas Maps, and C++ font constants as macros and as const/constexpr.

• Apply textual and all FontForge transformations to SVG files during the generation.

Point it to a folder of one or more (square) SVG files and, 💥, you have a font (or any of the other export formats it supports).

The README is very clear and examples are provided, so go forth and fontify all the [SVG] things!

Cardo

Cardo is a typeface from Fonts For Scholars and primarily designed for classicists, biblical scholars, medievalists, or linguists searching for the “perfect” Unicode font. It is large1 and meticulously crafted to cater specifically to the unique requirements of these scholarly disciplines.

Apologies in advance for getting a bit nerdy/formal, below. This font deserves some respect, as David Perry has made this a central project of his for quite some time.

Originating from the Renaissance era, Cardo draws inspiration from a typeface originally crafted for the famed printer Aldus Manutius. This typeface gained recognition when it was first employed to print Pietro Bembo‘s germinal work, “De Aetna”.

Revived in modern times under various names like Bembo, Aetna, and Aldine 401, Cardo was specifically chosen due to its classical aesthetics (i.e., “it looks old”) and suitability for scholarly endeavors. Notably, the design of Cardo allows for optimal sizing and positioning of diacritics, enhancing legibility in ways that other fonts can (visibly) struggle to achieve.

But, that’s not all!2

Cardo also includes a comprehensive set of harmonious Greek characters3, seamlessly blending them with the Roman letters, as well as a wide range of additional characters specifically curated to assist scholars. The Hebrew characters in Cardo have also been painstakingly crafted to closely resemble those found in the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, ensuring authenticity and faithfulness to established standards.

The font comes with a PDF manual! Chapter 2 of said manual presents general information about the font. Chapter 3 explains the characters that Cardo contains. All the Open Type features are laid bare in Chapter 4. Chapter 5 has extensive tables that show all the font’s Private Use characters (PUC/PUA) since there is no other way (apart from using a font browser) to know what is available.

It’s a lovely font that has use beyond scholarly text. I’ll figure out a way to carve out some time to see how it behaves in a chart context.

FIN

Be safe today, 🇺🇸, and go forth and encourage municipalities to frighten pets and wildlife, cause real environmental damage, and potentially harm careless/daft humans; all to celebrate something whose real reason for coming to pass is lost on most of the 🇺🇸 citizens, and definitely in dire jeopardy, today. ☮

P.S.

We did our annual re-watch of ID4 yesterday, so I would be remiss in my hrbrmstr duties if I did not link to one of the best Presidential speeches in history.