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Re: On fonts

Posted: 09 Aug 2014, 19:25
by Markelius
I was just going to retrace the letters from one of the Cyrillic variants linked by pvdk.

EDIT: Thanks for the image scrawl, I will get to tracing soon. I just tested and I can import .eps exports from flash into fontforge just fine, so I should be able to trace, export, and import into fontforge, position, and save. :)

For reference, how many locales has Morrowind been translated/ported to? I know there's a Russian and a French version, I think a polish version too, but a good comprehensive list would be nice. :) I imagine all the characters we need will be covered in Latin and Cyrillic though.

EDIT 2: I begun tracing today, my method of tracing in flash then importing the letters into FontForge as .eps worked nicely. I got the capital A finished just to test the waters.

I've dubbed the font "Open Magicka" as a play on "Magic Cards". I'll try to trace at least one letter every so often. I'm tracing based off of the various versions of Magic Cards I have on my computer and the image exports scrawl provided. I'm basically trying to match up the fonts I have to the original font export as best I can then tracing the closest match. My target is a font that contains all the characters in the game's Magic Cards font as well as the Cyrillic characters in the fonts pvdk linked.

That is my initial target, it'll be a fair bit of work but it'll be really nice to have an Open Source version of this font. I hope I won't disappoint!

Re: On fonts

Posted: 13 Aug 2014, 15:17
by Markelius

Re: On fonts

Posted: 13 Aug 2014, 15:59
by ezze
Well, the ABC looks nice...

Re: On fonts

Posted: 13 Aug 2014, 16:20
by Markelius
I just started working on this a few days ago, I'll have more progress as time goes on. :P

Re: On fonts

Posted: 14 Aug 2014, 10:33
by ezze
I am looking forward too, I like fonts :)

Re: On fonts

Posted: 17 Aug 2014, 06:27
by pvdk
Looks good Markelius! You even came up with the same name I was going to propose to Georg, the guy who was working on a Magic Cards font before.

I sent him an e-mail and he is still interested in finishing the font for us, but he lacks the time. Send me a PM if you feel like contacting him to work together or maybe he could give you some advice.

Re: On fonts

Posted: 17 Aug 2014, 23:26
by Markelius
A-J are complete. On to the second row!

Not sure about doing a collab, I kind of want to do this on my own so I can get comfortable with fontmaking, it's something I've been interested in a while. For instance, for my electronic music, I created my own typeface which can be seen here. I never completed the typeface proper or turned it into an actual font, but it's a good example of my work.

Regardless, I do intend to complete this typeface, so, my work continues!

Re: On fonts

Posted: 18 Aug 2014, 06:26
by lysol
Nice, keep it up :)

Re: On fonts

Posted: 18 Aug 2014, 06:46
by Deonsion
reddit.com/r/typography might help out some too.

Re: On fonts

Posted: 29 Aug 2014, 01:05
by Markelius
So I've worked on this more since last week, and finished another ten characters, capital K to capital T.

A few of these differ a little from the fonts I have on my computer, those being Goudy Medieval, Magic Medieval, and two variations of Magic Cards. The ones that differ are the Q and R, the H in the last screenshot was also different from the fonts I have on my computer, but this was in effort of making it resemble the H in the bitmap version of the font.

Funnily enough, my R is actually based on the R in the font Plantagenet Cherokee, a basic, serif R, but I gave it the same serifs and qualities of the rest of the font so it looks consistent. Much better looking than the capital R from the fonts on my computer I think.

The others are pretty much supposed to look exactly like characters from Morrowind's bitmap font. I'm really also trying to give them nice refined curves that don't look wonky or excessive, as a lot of Goudy Medieval's curves didn't really add much to the font. These are subtle things though, nothing you'd notice at 12pt and probably nothing you'd even notice unless you compared the fonts side by side at a large size.

Anyways, my work continues, hopefully by next week I can have the next ten characters done, which is captial U-Z , question mark, exclamation mark, percentage, and ampersand. I'm going to be giving the punctuation characters and symbols all the same qualities and serifs as the rest of the font too, a lot of variations on the Cards font don't do this, and have standard sans-serif special characters, something I thought was lazy.

'till next time!