Do you fancy having a go at designing bitmap fonts but don’t know where to begin or what software to use? Then why not try Microsoft Excel! With a bit of Python, and an Excel workbook, you too can create bitmap fonts suitable for use in your applications! The worksheet First things first. We need […]
In Part 1 of this blog post series, I started setting up a Git repository for one of my horrendous old fonts to explore whether we can adopt good software development practices in a typical font project. At the end of that post we populated a new repository, graham-sans, with a folder structure that suits […]
As I’m fond of mentioning at every opportunity, my twin passions are web development and typeface design. It was curious though that until recently, I never considered combining the two disciplines. Fonts are essentially pieces of software; can we therefore apply techniques commonly found in the world of software engineering to font projects? Software engineers […]
Way back in the 1990s, I created a few bitmap fonts on the Commodore Amiga, notably Webcleaner, a set of fonts for early web browsers. Technology moves on, and I was concerned that my handiwork would be lost forever. Could they be revived to live another day? Thus began a deep dive into the Amiga […]
In Part 2 of our exploration of Amiga fonts we looked at the format of the font contents file and found… well not much of interest. Let’s now turn our attention to the other file type – the font descriptor file. The font descriptor filename is usually numeric – the number corresponding to the vertical […]
In Part 1 of our exploration of Amiga bitmap fonts, we identified the structure of a font on disk. We’ll now take a look at one of the files in more detail – the font contents file, suffixed .font. To identify the structure of this file we turn again to the Amiga ROM Kernel Reference […]
Chances are you’re reading these words on a device with nice, crisp text. The typeface you’re looking at now is drawn from mathematical lines and curves, which means it can be scaled up and down to look good at large and small sizes. It wasn’t always this way. Early home computers such as the ZX […]
When trying to run “Install/Update Scripts” in Fontlab 7, you may experience one of the following issues: Installation fails with a “Cannot install pip” error message Installation of pip may appear to be successful but a restart of Fontlab prompts the user to install pip again These errors kept cropping up for me on Macs […]
At the end of Part 6 we finally reached our goal – our iOS device is finally able to solve a Countdown numbers game using voice alone. To round things off, let’s add a nice bit of UI that displays our calculation in NumberRace branding. In Part 5 we created an Intents extension. At the […]
At the end of Part 5 we came tantalisingly close to our goal of implementing a Countdown numbers game solver in Siri. But we hit a snag. Siri recognises the user saying “three” but not “eight”. What is going on here? Let’s take a look at the screenshots: There’s a clue there. When I say […]