Typophile

Complicated dot font

zound

I'm working on a dot font but I have two special criteria that may prove difficult to implement.

1. I want the font when sizing up and down to keep the dots the same size, just increase the letter form size.
2. I want the space between the dots to expand as the sizing increases until there is room for an extra dot, then tighten. Then expand, extra dot, tighten, etc etc. And obviously the reverse when sizing down.

I'm happy to have set increments of size (for example increments of 1 point only - no decimal points) to make things easier. And perhaps have only a limited range of point sizes available if necessary.

I hope you understand what I'm trying to do and hopefully let me know how I should go about this.

The look of the font would be something similar to 'Railway thin' or 'District thin' but in dot form.

HVB

You'll need a matching bitmap font for each possible size, and an operating environment that would use them to render the output. It sounds more like a movie than a font...

- Herb

Nick Curtis

I agree with Herb: as a font, no can do...

zound

If making the individual sizes one by one (maybe about 10 sizes) is possible, is there any roundabout way of rendering them as a usable font?

Reynir Heiðberg...

@shanuea – If you manage to pull off what you want without resorting to bitmaps, you will almost certainly be enshrined and get sacrifices of posh wine, expensive food and nubile virgins.

HVB

"If making the individual sizes one by one (maybe about 10 sizes) is possible, is there any roundabout way of rendering them as a usable font?"

No, but possibly as one separate font for each desired size (named something like BigDots8, BigDots16, BigDots128, etc. with instructions to the user to match the font name with the point size.

This is similar (although for very different reasons and with different design techniques) to what Adobe has done with their optical fonts (q.v.)

- Herb

zound

Yes that seems to be the route I'll have to take.

Thanks for the help. And that's interesting about the optical fonts - first I've heard about them.

zound

So I've more or less completed the font creating all the masters from scratch:

It has six different masters for six different sizes. As well as a regular and a bold version for each size (so that means 12 masters in total)

So the names of each master are something like this:
Size80 – Regular
Size80 – Bold

Size100 – Regular
Size100 – Bold

Size120 – Regular
Size120 – Bold

Size140 – Regular
Size140 – Bold

Size160 – Regular
Size160 – Bold

Size180 – Regular
Size180 – Bold

I would preferably like all these to be together as a family for ease of use. Unfortunately I'm using "Glyphs" which only exports a maximum of four. Any ideas about how I can export this font as neatly as possible?
(I'll upload it for critique soon)

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