(Yet) another version of Letraset Oxford

Whilst browsing dafont.com the other day, I noticed that (yet) another version of the classic Letraset Oxford typeface has been created, and this time it's another free (as in freedom) version.

The font is named Oxford-CP and was created by Diogene. It's licensed under the GPL with the font exception rather than the SIL OFL which I used to license my version.

The non-free version of Oxford, called Sportowy, which boasts some beautiful glyphs for things like @, is available here.

My version, which I called "Scene" in honour of the BBCtv schools programme that used the face for its logo, also features capital letters and Central European accenting and is available to download from here.

BBC Micro game Pipeline used Oxford

Ironically, after the huge amount of effort I put into creating it (see here, here and here), I still haven't actually done anything with my Scene font - but hopefully I'll get around to doing something with it soon.

Let's Go Nationwide

Recently I've been playing about recreating various SMPTE and custom made film leaders in Flash 8 and Inkscape. One of the most interesting for me, and one that reminds me of Blue Peter for some reason, is the BBC's own film leader. Here it is:

While working on film leaders, I've settled upon a hybrid Flash/Inkscape workflow in which I create the individual frames in Inkscape as Inkscape SVG files.

SMPTE Society Leader frames created as SVG files

I then export them all as EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) files so they can be imported into Macromedia Flash 8. You could export all the files from Inkscape by hand, but to save time I use a little Bash shell script instead:

#!/bin/bash
#
# Export all SVG files in a directory as EPS files

for i in *.svg; do
    inkscape $i --export-eps `basename $i .svg`".eps"

done

Then I import the EPS files into Flash and I'm ready to start putting the animation together.