Welcome to Gaia! ::

Hehe thanks. It's a bit funky because of the way the Anzer Pex writing system works, but once you know which keys produce which letters, it's pretty useful... although it's not very pretty yet. I'm working on the beta version right now to get the crust and the rust off of my font skills.

Speaking of which... Vajra, I just found out how to change the brush to a diagonal line, so I can easily do calligraphic fonts now if you (or anyone else) wants a conscript font that looks a bit Hindi/Arabic.

I just need to know which of the following you want in the font, and their closest English representation so that I know which symbols to map to which keys...

1. Lowercase Letters
2. Uppercase Letters (If Any)
3. Punctuation Marks (Only Those Desired)
4. Numbers (1234567890)
5. Non-Punctuation Symbols (@, #, %, custom symbols, etc.)

If you don't have uppercase/lowercase, then uppercase keys (shift) will be used only if the letters won't fit in the lowercase set and the unused non-shift punctuation mark keys. Like I said, a simple chart or something would be most helpful.

Having no uppercase makes everything easier. 3nodding

Number pad typing different numbers from the row at the top? I don't think I can do that. I'm pretty sure the number pad keys share key assignments with the top row... The only reason they're both there is because the top row is easier to hit while typing normally, but the pad is easier to use when doing calculations. I can look around and see if that can be achieved, but I'm pretty sure that won't work (at least, not with TrueType (TTF) fonts).

As for smaller letters, I'd like to find that out for myself at least. I know that drawing the glyphs with thicker lines and fewer curves helps a lot, but I'm pretty sure there's a way to make pre-set versions of smaller sizes so that they look correct (and do not have to be scaled down from the normal version since they have their own set). I'm definitely looking into this, but I can't guarantee the font looking good at smaller than 14pt this first time around. Just for reference, the default Gaia post font is 9pt I think. Oh, and one more thing, even though the font might not look good at 14pt or below, it can still go all the way down... It will just look blurry or will look as if some pieces have vanished.

Oh, and one last thing: Since these fonts have to be mapped to a set of English keys, when you change the font to a regular English one, it WILL look like gibberish. Only when the font is set to your conscript's will it look like it's supposed to (this is common sense really, but some people just don't get it). If you plan to use a font on the web, I suggest using screenshots of the sample writing so that you don't need everyone to download and install the font just to see it.

Would it be possible to do a sort-of abugida-ish thing for me? Unless digraphs are doable, there are far too many characters in Askripandi (the Aquénandi script) to use a standard alphabet.

If you can, I'm willing to provide the letterforms in a format professional-looking enough that (hopefully) you could just copy and paste. ;Þ

Allright, thanks for the clarification. Sounds good. I'll get to work on that for ya then. I'll try and make it worth your while if I like the results. And unless you really screw up, I probably will like it anyway.

My own Anzer Pex font is rather difficult to use, because in order to form words in writing, you have to literally connnect two vowels to make a diphthong. Thus you can't type moi, because that's "mo ee," you have to make it mo-i so that it's "moy." There's no way I could feasibly include individual glyphs for each of the diphthongs and the triphthongs and still be able to type it quickly.

<--- How the font looks when typed
1. Ix mP'J zigrIk. <--- Typed so that the font shows the writing correctly
2. i'x mo-i zigri'k. <--- The actual romanization of the writing
3. (to be) (I) (Xeigrich)(.) <--- The structure of the senctence
4. I am Xeigrich. <--- English translation

I have to remember that to make the "front half diphthong" version of the O vowel's letter, I have to hold Shift-P -- where in romanization I just use a hyphen -- and that to get the lazy version of the I vowel, I have to use uppercase -- where in romanization it just has an apostrophe after it. I have it so that the diphthong curve can be inserted with the apostrophe key or the hyphen key (two different heights). If I wanted to, I could make another glyph that would allow the hyphen to come AFTER the diphthong and still have the curve appear in the right place (to the left), but that wouldn't be useful to me.

That's basically what I meant when I said that changing the font back to a normal one will leave you with gibberish that doesn't even look like your conlang or conscript.

It's worth it for me, though, because it looks a hell of a lot nicer in font form than when I hand write it, but if someone else with actual good handwriting mastered my Anzer Pex writing system, it might then look better than my font.

Go check my "Font Shop" thread. I've already got the font for Niora up for download. cool