FONTS
When you write anything with a computer, generally you don't pay much attention to the font used, indeed it often happens that you don't even choose it, you leave the default one from the system.
But behind a font there are tens if not hundreds of hours of work and studies of graphics and aesthetics, legibility, etc.
Fonts are generally very expensive and precious, like the letters illuminated by the scribes of medieval abbeys, and the work of those who create new fonts is not very different.
The work for the creation of a single character is long and accurate, it is partly calculation and technique, similar to an engineering construction, partly it is art and good taste.
In this regard, it is possible to download or consult a small report on the world of fonts and glyphs:
- Drafted with WikiMhu,font created by Fulvio Mhu Calzamiglia using OpenDraw and FontForge.
written by me following a little research on the subject of FONT and their structure.
You can download the font WikiMhu.
Here are some links related to the complex world of fonts:
| SITE | DESCRIPTION |
| http://www.searchfreefonts.com/faq/ | Search site and proposal of free and free fonts. |
| http://www.serenoeditore.com/font/ | Curious manual of graphics and calligraphy, which talks about typographic fonts, in Italian and interesting. |
| http://www.truetype-typography.com/ | History of TrueType fonts, with very useful links and news. |
| http://www.alanwood.net/ |
Interesting site relating to fonts of the UNICODE universal standard, with numerous free fonts in various alphabets of the world. |
Below is a short list of sites from which you can download fonts for personal use.
| SITE | DESCRIPTION |
| http://www.fontparadise.com/ | Wide choice of hundreds of fonts. For MACs and PCs. |
| https://www.abstractfonts.com/ | Over 10,000 fonts divided into categories. Edited and commented. Nice site. |
| https://www.websiteplanet.com/it/blog/migliori-font-gratuiti/ | A great collection of free well made fonts (From Diana Gonzales, THANKS!) |
HOW TO MAKE A FONT
To create a font you must use the appropriate software. There are numerous commercial possibilities, all of which cost a few hundred euros, depending on the manufacturer and the power of the software.
However, there is FontForge, a specialized CAD software, of very high power, of a professional level and of considerable complexity, open source, therefore completely free and decidedly stable. This program was created for UNIX and this is a guarantee of exceptional accuracy and robustness of the software itself.
A single font created with FONTFORGE can simultaneously contain the following character sets:
- Latin
- Greek
- Coptic
- Cyrillic
- Armenian
- Hebrew
- Arabic
-thaana (maldives)
- runic
- hangul (Korean)
- hiragana (Japanese)
- katakana (Japanese)
-bopomofo (Taiwan)
- kangxi (Chinese radicals with side translation)
- Traditional Chinese (not complete)
- africans
- devanagari (Sanskrit)
- thai
- lao
- Tibetan
- Georgian
- tigrigno (Ethiopian)
- cherokee
- syllabic Canadian
- ogham
- braille
- scientific symbols of every possible discipline
in all, each font can contain 65537 different symbols.
Of all these alphabets the program contains all the characters in all their forms and variants, with all transliterations and pronunciations.
Each alphabet also has the characters relating to international and local units of measurement, which must exist, and all possible commercial symbols linked to the culture that produced the character.
Not so bad for an open source program!
It can also import images in a variety of formats to use as a foundation for creating fonts, and compile fonts to formats for MAC and WINDOWS.
It has a corrector of the characters as regards the vector structure and the congruence (alignments, tangents to each other) of the points, very useful for homogenizing ungraceful characters.
FontForge was created for UNIX but different versions have been created for other operating systems.
FontForge for CygWin can be freely downloaded from this link, where you can also find the instructions to install it:
http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/