Making A Font; Serif Fonts For Coding; Featured Foundry: SIL International

Today we transition from turkeys back to typography with a peek at how to make a font, a category of coding fonts that is far too lonely, and a pretty cool foundry that does great work around the globe.

TL;DR

This is an AI-generated summary of today’s Drop.

• Secton one begins with a detailed exploration of the process of creating a font, referencing Rek Bell’s “Making a Font” blog post. Bell shares their journey of creating a custom font for their comic, Hakum, and the post serves as a guide for beginners interested in creating their own fonts. The process involved two iterations, one based on digital handwriting using a pen tablet and the other created from a scanned image of handwriting.

• The second section of the post discusses the use of serif fonts for coding, referencing a post on “Serif Fonts for Coding” by George Ho. Ho argues that stressed monospaced serif fonts can be better for coding than most default coding typefaces, and provides a short list of monospaced serif fonts that could be used for coding.

• The final section of the post highlights the work of SIL International, a non-profit organization dedicated to studying, developing, and documenting languages. SIL International supports its mission through its font foundry, which creates and provides a variety of fonts that support a wide range of global languages. These fonts are released under the SIL Open Font License, a free and open-source license specifically designed for fonts and related software.

Making A Font

While I have totally abused the SVG-to-TTF process of creating a “font”, I have yet to take the time to truly create a complete font from ideation to basic completion. It’s “work” and my attention span for that type of design work is getting longer, but not long enough to drive it to completion.

That may change after coming across Rek Bell’s, “Making a Font” blog post. It it, Rek shares their journey of creating a custom font for their comic, Hakum, despite not being a professional designer.

Rek embarked on this project to address the inconsistency and legibility issues they faced when drawing text digitally with a pen tablet and go into great detail about the font-making process — from the initial idea to the final product. It’s a pretty spiffy guide for us beginners who are interested in creating their own fonts, but feel that it is a bit of a daunting task.

Bell’s process involved two iterations. The first was based on their digital handwriting using a pen tablet, while the second was created from a scanned image of their handwriting. The second iteration resulted in a more natural and organic font, as handwriting on paper tends to be less precise. Unfortunately, that process won’t work for me given how horrible my handwriting was and is.

Throughout the process, Bell learned about the various terms that describe the parts of a typeface (something we’ve tried to cover along the way in these Drops). Understanding these terms and their functions is key to making better design choices and ensuring the creation of a functional font. Bell also discovered that their letters came out better when writing a sentence, as it allowed them to focus less on the constraints of drawing on a grid.

If you’ve been bitten by the typography bug but have never endeavoured to make a font, this post may just be enough to tip you over the edge and get started.

Serif Fonts For Coding

While I am a convert to the new Monaspace fonts (Radon variant) for my text and code editors, I am not one to shy away from considering new options and welcome suggestions.

A friend of the Drop sent along a link to this short post on “Serif Fonts for Coding” by George Ho that talks about, well, using serif [monospace] fonts for coding.

It is short so I’ll try to be brief here (and make you go there for the links to the fonts, below).

Ho argues that stressed monospaced serif fonts can be better for coding than most default coding typefaces, and highlights the overlap between “fonts good for coding” and “fonts good for dyslexia,” as both require easily distinguishable characters.

It turns out this is a font category that could use some 💙 as the post only provides a short list of monospaced serif fonts that include:

• Libertinus Mono (Font Library, GitHub)

• Linux Libertine Mono (Wikipedia, Font Squirrel, Font Library)

• SimSun (Microsoft, Dafont Free)

• Sun Gallant Demi (mentioned in a Unix StackExchange post)

• Triplicate (MB Type)

• Xanh Mono (Google Fonts, GitHub)

While the use of serif fonts in coding environments is not as common as sans-serif fonts, these monospaced serif fonts offer an alternative for those who prefer the aesthetic appeal and readability of serif fonts.

Give it a go and, perhaps, take this as inspiration to make a new serif monospaced font from what you learned in the first section!

Featured Foundry: SIL International

SIL International is a non-profit organization that is dedicated to studying, developing, and documenting languages, especially those that are lesser-known. One of the ways they support this mission is through their font foundry, which creates and provides a variety of fonts that support a wide range of global languages. These fonts are released under the SIL Open Font License, a free and open-source license specifically designed for fonts and related software. As we’ve noted before, this license allows for the use, bundling, modification, and redistribution of the fonts, encouraging shared value and collaborative development.

One of the notable fonts from SIL International is Charis SIL (a sample of which is in the section header). This is an OpenType-enabled font family that supports the Latin and Cyrillic scripts. It includes a number of optional features that may be useful or required for particular uses or languages; these can be controlled through the use of font features, which are user-selectable features applied to text, often activated in applications through a font properties menu item, dialog, or style definition (we’ve been on a bit of a tear about these features, of late).

Charis SIL is closely based on the design of Bitstream Charter, but the glyphs were completely redrawn based only on visual reference to Charter. There are some significant design differences in the serif structure, proportions, diacritics, and Cyrillic. The design was also adjusted and extended to cover a much wider range of characters and publishing needs.

The other fonts they have are also pretty froody.

FIN

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