Monday, March 01, 2010
Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Sant
I must admit glass scares me. Oh I see, you just give the impression of glass don't you?
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Orbituary
I had finished creating my BSB Squarial font on December 16th. It was now the December 17th, the event was on January 9th, Rory hadn't yet received any BSB material from Kaleidoscope and time was getting short.
So, to make sure I had a fighting chance of getting an ident ready in time for Rory to use, I turned to the ever reliable TV-Ark site. I found some wonderful scans of BSB promotional material that I could use as source material. I started putting as much of this as I thought would useful into Inkscape.
The first thing I did were the channel logos - Movies, Now, Sport, Galaxy and Power Station. Due to the good quality of the source material I ended up being able to produce nice vector versions of these logos in Inkscape.
I also used Google Image Search which sucessfully came up with some other source material I thought may be handy. At the fascinating Vintage Broadcasting site I found a fantastic IBA breakdown caption, which I recreated in Inkscape.
...and a test card used for engineering tests. Again I recreated it in Inkscape.
Another thing I found was the caption that was broadcast when BSB transmissions on the Marco Polo satellite ceased. Again here's my Inkscape recreation.
It was interesting that they used Friz Quadrata rather than the BSB corporate font for this. I suppose they must have been past caring by then!
Once I'd done all this I sent it all off to Rory in Inkscape SVG format so that he could use or edit any of the files I created if he needed to.
The good news was that Rory had received the BSB material from Kaleidoscope. The bad news was that it seemed to be mainly third generation VHS stuff. This is a nightmare source material for recreation because the VHS format chucks away so much picture detail and colour information that recreating anything from grabs of VHS material is slow, frustrating and largely down to guesswork.
However, Rory did send back ident grab of a BSB logo which was very handy, and which I duly recreated in Inkscape. The letters are a bolder weight of the BSB font than the one used in the caption below it, so I drew them from scratch.
The coloured ring in the BSB logo is quite interesting. To do this I created a coloured background that was made of a red, yellow, green and blue fills overlayed on top of each other and grouped into a single object.
Then I created the shape of the ring, and used that as a mask over the coloured background.
My final port of call was Mike Brown's excellent mb21 site. The mb21 site contains an extensive library of scans historical documents related to UK Broadcast transmission. What I was after was the famous BSB testcard complete with the girl who won the newspaper "be a the satellite test card girl" competition.
I created the testcard with a green circle in the centre in place of a photograph and a Kaleidoscope logo in place of a channel logo. The green circle was so that Rory could key in whatever he wanted.
Once I had done this, and sent it to Rory I had done about all the still images I usefully could so I couldn't delay doing the animated ident in Flash any longer. I still had no audio too, but I decided I'd start creating an ident anyway and hope for the best.
After Channel 4 burst onto the scene in 1982 with its famous CGI blocks logo there had been a glut of shiny plastic and metallic 3D shapes whizzing about the screen in television presentation. That meant that by the time BSB came along just seven years later that sort of thing was all old hat. What was now in vogue was creating lots of soft fluttery layers of images on top of each other with subtle lighting changes.
This actually suited me, as I don't have my copy of Swift 3D here in Hungary with me, so I couldn't have created something very three dimensional anyway (although if I had had Swift 3D my finished BSB ident would have been much nicer).
The brief from Kaleidoscope was to create an ident with the BSB logo and the legend "The Quest Continues..." underneath it. Obviously thoughts of space and Star Trek and Dr. Who came to mind.
"The Quest Continues..." text would be easy - I'd simply zoom it into view with a trail Tyne Tees 1979 stylee. Clichéd, naff and typical of me...
For the background I used a nice picture of Pleiades star cluster that I found on Wikipedia. I'd used this before for a Rediffusion Christmas ident that I'd recreated for Transdiffusion. You can see it below, behind the Rediffusion ad astral logo - you'll probably have to click on the image below to see it.
One of the things I wanted was to make a nice form-up of the diamond shape around the BSB logo that represented the BSB "squarial" receiving dish. I also wanted to make this a bit kaleidoscopic, in honour of the fact that the ident was being done for Kaleidoscope.
I decided on the simple device of making the sides of the box zoom in with coloured trails using Flash motion tweens.
I did an early test with solid colours - and this looked all wrong. It looked like a 1970s cel animated ident.
However, with some gradient fills and some alpha transparency it suddenly looked all right.
Rory sent some audio and a genuine BSB Galaxy ident - this was handy because I hadn't actually seen any real BSB presentation at this point.
I realised that I needed to make the ident longer, and I also needed to add some more elements to layer it a bit more and make it a bit more "Lambie-Nairn" than "Lamey-Dave". I came up with some ribbons accompanied by Galaxy-style five-pointed stars.
These were simply animated using shape tweens (shape morphs) in Flash. As well as tweening the shape of the ribbons, I anmated the gradient fill inside them to simulate the lighting effects. I used primary and secondary colours rather than the subtler shades that Lambie Nairn used as I wanted to get over the idea of "television".
Again, drawing the ribbons in Macromedia Flash 8 was a horrible job and every second of doing it made me miss Inkscape terribly. Using Bézier handles in Flash 8 is fiddly and unintuitive and I can't believe how much work I actually did using them!
I could have used Flash 8 Professional filter effects in my ident, which would have allowed Gaussian blurs, compositing effects etc. and made the end result both more pleasant to look at and created an effect more faithful to the genuine BSB idents. However I decided against this as if I had relied upon them and Rory couldn't import them his end we would have been stuck. I didn't have time to post him a DVD of an exported video file from Flash.
Rory, as always, immediately spotted what was wrong with my ident and added some beautiful stars that slowly moved towards the viewer, which made all the difference to the finished product. And here it is:
I'm really, really pleased with the way the finished ident turned out. My comfort zone is doing material from the 50s, 60s and 70s so I was really dreading doing a job that was supposed to evoke the late 80s. So to get anything approaching half-decent was a huge relief.
So, to make sure I had a fighting chance of getting an ident ready in time for Rory to use, I turned to the ever reliable TV-Ark site. I found some wonderful scans of BSB promotional material that I could use as source material. I started putting as much of this as I thought would useful into Inkscape.
The first thing I did were the channel logos - Movies, Now, Sport, Galaxy and Power Station. Due to the good quality of the source material I ended up being able to produce nice vector versions of these logos in Inkscape.
Five Inkscape BSB channel logos
I also used Google Image Search which sucessfully came up with some other source material I thought may be handy. At the fascinating Vintage Broadcasting site I found a fantastic IBA breakdown caption, which I recreated in Inkscape.
Inkscape IBA/BSB breakdown caption
...and a test card used for engineering tests. Again I recreated it in Inkscape.
Inkscape BSB Engineering Card
Another thing I found was the caption that was broadcast when BSB transmissions on the Marco Polo satellite ceased. Again here's my Inkscape recreation.
Inkscape BSB Closure caption
It was interesting that they used Friz Quadrata rather than the BSB corporate font for this. I suppose they must have been past caring by then!
Once I'd done all this I sent it all off to Rory in Inkscape SVG format so that he could use or edit any of the files I created if he needed to.
The good news was that Rory had received the BSB material from Kaleidoscope. The bad news was that it seemed to be mainly third generation VHS stuff. This is a nightmare source material for recreation because the VHS format chucks away so much picture detail and colour information that recreating anything from grabs of VHS material is slow, frustrating and largely down to guesswork.
However, Rory did send back ident grab of a BSB logo which was very handy, and which I duly recreated in Inkscape. The letters are a bolder weight of the BSB font than the one used in the caption below it, so I drew them from scratch.
Inkscape BSB logo
The coloured ring in the BSB logo is quite interesting. To do this I created a coloured background that was made of a red, yellow, green and blue fills overlayed on top of each other and grouped into a single object.
Inkscape BSB logo with the ring mask unset
Then I created the shape of the ring, and used that as a mask over the coloured background.
My final port of call was Mike Brown's excellent mb21 site. The mb21 site contains an extensive library of scans historical documents related to UK Broadcast transmission. What I was after was the famous BSB testcard complete with the girl who won the newspaper "be a the satellite test card girl" competition.
I created the testcard with a green circle in the centre in place of a photograph and a Kaleidoscope logo in place of a channel logo. The green circle was so that Rory could key in whatever he wanted.
Inkscape BSB/Kaleidoscope test card
Once I had done this, and sent it to Rory I had done about all the still images I usefully could so I couldn't delay doing the animated ident in Flash any longer. I still had no audio too, but I decided I'd start creating an ident anyway and hope for the best.
After Channel 4 burst onto the scene in 1982 with its famous CGI blocks logo there had been a glut of shiny plastic and metallic 3D shapes whizzing about the screen in television presentation. That meant that by the time BSB came along just seven years later that sort of thing was all old hat. What was now in vogue was creating lots of soft fluttery layers of images on top of each other with subtle lighting changes.
This actually suited me, as I don't have my copy of Swift 3D here in Hungary with me, so I couldn't have created something very three dimensional anyway (although if I had had Swift 3D my finished BSB ident would have been much nicer).
The brief from Kaleidoscope was to create an ident with the BSB logo and the legend "The Quest Continues..." underneath it. Obviously thoughts of space and Star Trek and Dr. Who came to mind.
"The Quest Continues..." text would be easy - I'd simply zoom it into view with a trail Tyne Tees 1979 stylee. Clichéd, naff and typical of me...
Tyne-Tees style text zoom
For the background I used a nice picture of Pleiades star cluster that I found on Wikipedia. I'd used this before for a Rediffusion Christmas ident that I'd recreated for Transdiffusion. You can see it below, behind the Rediffusion ad astral logo - you'll probably have to click on the image below to see it.
Flash 8 Rediffusion Xmas recreation
One of the things I wanted was to make a nice form-up of the diamond shape around the BSB logo that represented the BSB "squarial" receiving dish. I also wanted to make this a bit kaleidoscopic, in honour of the fact that the ident was being done for Kaleidoscope.
I decided on the simple device of making the sides of the box zoom in with coloured trails using Flash motion tweens.
I did an early test with solid colours - and this looked all wrong. It looked like a 1970s cel animated ident.
Rather 70s...
However, with some gradient fills and some alpha transparency it suddenly looked all right.
What a difference a fill makes...
Rory sent some audio and a genuine BSB Galaxy ident - this was handy because I hadn't actually seen any real BSB presentation at this point.
I realised that I needed to make the ident longer, and I also needed to add some more elements to layer it a bit more and make it a bit more "Lambie-Nairn" than "Lamey-Dave". I came up with some ribbons accompanied by Galaxy-style five-pointed stars.
Animating the ribbons in Flash
These were simply animated using shape tweens (shape morphs) in Flash. As well as tweening the shape of the ribbons, I anmated the gradient fill inside them to simulate the lighting effects. I used primary and secondary colours rather than the subtler shades that Lambie Nairn used as I wanted to get over the idea of "television".
Completed ribbons layer
Again, drawing the ribbons in Macromedia Flash 8 was a horrible job and every second of doing it made me miss Inkscape terribly. Using Bézier handles in Flash 8 is fiddly and unintuitive and I can't believe how much work I actually did using them!
I could have used Flash 8 Professional filter effects in my ident, which would have allowed Gaussian blurs, compositing effects etc. and made the end result both more pleasant to look at and created an effect more faithful to the genuine BSB idents. However I decided against this as if I had relied upon them and Rory couldn't import them his end we would have been stuck. I didn't have time to post him a DVD of an exported video file from Flash.
Rory, as always, immediately spotted what was wrong with my ident and added some beautiful stars that slowly moved towards the viewer, which made all the difference to the finished product. And here it is:
The finished BSB "Quest" ident
I'm really, really pleased with the way the finished ident turned out. My comfort zone is doing material from the 50s, 60s and 70s so I was really dreading doing a job that was supposed to evoke the late 80s. So to get anything approaching half-decent was a huge relief.
It's hip to be Squarial
Kaleidoscope is a non-profit making organisation that researches vintage British television. Their publications are essential reading for anyone seriously interested in British television history. It also holds regular fund-raising events for the RNLI, where rare archive gems are screened and auctions of memorabilia are held.
I've done various graphic items for Kaleidoscope events in the past thanks to my friendship with the multi-talented Rory Clark. Rory recovers many of the domestic videotape recordings that Kaleidoscope discovers, and also compiles the videos and documentaries that are shown at their fund-raising events.
The last Kaleidoscope event was held jointly with the British Film Institute at NFT1 at the BFI Southbank, London on January 9th. Part of the event was a showcase of recently recovered programmes from the ill-fated BSB (British Satellite Broadcasting) service. Two of the main programme providers for BSB were Noel Gay TV and John Gau Productions. Sadly, nearly all of their programmes for BSB were junked. However Kaleidoscope has been busy helping track down domestic video recordings of lost BSB programmes to return them to the archives.
Rory asked if I would like to contribute some graphics to help him out with the BSB segment, and I was delighted to be asked. The corporate look for BSB was designed by Martin Lambie-Nairn, and I think it was very nice indeed.
One of the key parts of the BSB corporate identity was a specially designed typeface. My first impression was that it looked similar to Albertus and Friz Quadrata. On looking at printed examples of the face, I decided it was an adaptation of the typeface Friz Quadrata, but I could not find a perfect match for in digital form. Therefore I decided it might be nice to make one.
To do this, I thought I'd go my usual route: I'd create glyphs in SVG format in the free software vector graphics package Inkscape, then I'd import my glyphs into the free software font design program FontForge 2.0 to create a truetype font file.
The first thing I did was think up a name - Squarial, which is a pun on the name of the Arial typeface and also the name of the distinctive square dish that you needed to receive BSB programmes.
The easy part being done, I then set to work. The first letter I looked at was the letter B. There were various differences I could see between this B and the B in Friz Quadrata. It was lighter, it had no flared serif at the base, the top loop was larger and there was an angled cut between the main vertical stem and the halfway line of the B.
The next letter I wanted to look at was the R, as this was another key letter to get right. As you can see, it is almost Agfa Rotis Semi Serif in appearance.
The other two letters I wanted to do were the S and the G. Once I'd got these right, I could use them as the basis for the rest of the alphabet.
I had to guess how some of the upper case glyphs would look, as I had no printed example, so I used the shapes found in Friz Quadrata as a base and modified them to match the letters I did have.
I've included some of my "guesses" above - hopefully they make some kind of coherent face when used with the other glyphs. Incidentally, I drew all the vector shapes in Squarial from scratch in Inkscape - the vector information in the truetype versions of Friz Quadrata I had was too messy and irregular to be of any use.
Due to the contraints of time, I didn't want to create lower case glyphs for the Squarial face, but I did want to add a small range of punctuation and some numerals so that Rory could use the finished font to caption the various clips that would be shown at the Kaleidoscope event.
One thing I thought would be nice would be to include Squarial-style squares as the points in the punctation. You can see some examples below.
Once the punctation was done I had a set of individual glyph .svg files all ready to import into FontForge.
The glyphs imported into FontForge with no problems at all. One of the things that saved me a lot of time when designing this font was keeping all of my Bézier control points on integer co-ordinates in Inkscape. I am now also much better at knowing where to put the control points so that FontForge will not need to add additional ones.
And, after spending some hours kerning glyph pairs, I had a finished truetype font.
The finished font, Squarial, is licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence (OFL) 1.1 and is available to download from here. Microsoft Windows users may need to use the free software tool 7-Zip to unpack the .tar.gz file.
The music accompanying the Kaleidoscope ident in this post is an excerpt from "The Iceman Cometh" from the album Grim by Maestoso. You can get hold of a copy on the Maestoso compilation "Uneasy Listening" which is available here.
I've done various graphic items for Kaleidoscope events in the past thanks to my friendship with the multi-talented Rory Clark. Rory recovers many of the domestic videotape recordings that Kaleidoscope discovers, and also compiles the videos and documentaries that are shown at their fund-raising events.
A bit of my past Kaleidoscope work
The last Kaleidoscope event was held jointly with the British Film Institute at NFT1 at the BFI Southbank, London on January 9th. Part of the event was a showcase of recently recovered programmes from the ill-fated BSB (British Satellite Broadcasting) service. Two of the main programme providers for BSB were Noel Gay TV and John Gau Productions. Sadly, nearly all of their programmes for BSB were junked. However Kaleidoscope has been busy helping track down domestic video recordings of lost BSB programmes to return them to the archives.
BSB corporate identity
Rory asked if I would like to contribute some graphics to help him out with the BSB segment, and I was delighted to be asked. The corporate look for BSB was designed by Martin Lambie-Nairn, and I think it was very nice indeed.
One of the key parts of the BSB corporate identity was a specially designed typeface. My first impression was that it looked similar to Albertus and Friz Quadrata. On looking at printed examples of the face, I decided it was an adaptation of the typeface Friz Quadrata, but I could not find a perfect match for in digital form. Therefore I decided it might be nice to make one.
To do this, I thought I'd go my usual route: I'd create glyphs in SVG format in the free software vector graphics package Inkscape, then I'd import my glyphs into the free software font design program FontForge 2.0 to create a truetype font file.
The first thing I did was think up a name - Squarial, which is a pun on the name of the Arial typeface and also the name of the distinctive square dish that you needed to receive BSB programmes.
The easy part being done, I then set to work. The first letter I looked at was the letter B. There were various differences I could see between this B and the B in Friz Quadrata. It was lighter, it had no flared serif at the base, the top loop was larger and there was an angled cut between the main vertical stem and the halfway line of the B.
Click to enlarge
The next letter I wanted to look at was the R, as this was another key letter to get right. As you can see, it is almost Agfa Rotis Semi Serif in appearance.
The other two letters I wanted to do were the S and the G. Once I'd got these right, I could use them as the basis for the rest of the alphabet.
I had to guess how some of the upper case glyphs would look, as I had no printed example, so I used the shapes found in Friz Quadrata as a base and modified them to match the letters I did have.
Click to enlarge
I've included some of my "guesses" above - hopefully they make some kind of coherent face when used with the other glyphs. Incidentally, I drew all the vector shapes in Squarial from scratch in Inkscape - the vector information in the truetype versions of Friz Quadrata I had was too messy and irregular to be of any use.
Due to the contraints of time, I didn't want to create lower case glyphs for the Squarial face, but I did want to add a small range of punctuation and some numerals so that Rory could use the finished font to caption the various clips that would be shown at the Kaleidoscope event.
One thing I thought would be nice would be to include Squarial-style squares as the points in the punctation. You can see some examples below.
Click to enlarge
Once the punctation was done I had a set of individual glyph .svg files all ready to import into FontForge.
The glyphs imported into FontForge with no problems at all. One of the things that saved me a lot of time when designing this font was keeping all of my Bézier control points on integer co-ordinates in Inkscape. I am now also much better at knowing where to put the control points so that FontForge will not need to add additional ones.
Sterling glyph in FontForge 2.0
And, after spending some hours kerning glyph pairs, I had a finished truetype font.
The finished font
The finished font, Squarial, is licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence (OFL) 1.1 and is available to download from here. Microsoft Windows users may need to use the free software tool 7-Zip to unpack the .tar.gz file.
The music accompanying the Kaleidoscope ident in this post is an excerpt from "The Iceman Cometh" from the album Grim by Maestoso. You can get hold of a copy on the Maestoso compilation "Uneasy Listening" which is available here.
Sunday, January 03, 2010
Karmic Tablets...
I've wanted a graphics tablet ever since I watched a pretentious little series on BBC2 (Painting With Light, 1987) where artists such as David Hockney were given the Quantel Paintbox to play with for an afternoon. They all produced a load of bobbins, but it looked such fun.
My interest was rekindled when a former colleague of mine, the multi-talented artist David "Peanut" Paramore used to bring a graphics tablet in to work with him a few years ago. The sort of work he produced with it was (and is) incredible and I really wanted to have a go at using a tablet for myself.
So, for Christmas this year, I was delighted to finally receive a Trust TB 5300 graphics tablet. Even after I asked my parents for this, I wasn't actually sure I'd be able to use the thing with GNU/Linux. I had visions of having to take a crash course in C and X programming in order to get the thing to work.
I needn't have worried - the nice thing about the GNU/Linux world is that its users tend to blog about getting unusual bits and bobs working on the operating system, and this was no exception.
A blog called "Dick's Open Source Life", which is written by Dick Thomas, came to my rescue and thanks to this blog post I have the Trust TB 5300 working on Ubuntu Karmic Koala very happily indeed.
Both Inkscape and The GIMP work fine; even pressure sensitivity functioning as expected. I didn't even need to callibrate the tablet as it worked fine out of the box.
In fact, the tablet even works properly when I'm running Macromedia Flash 8 via WINE.
Thanks once again for your help Dick!
My interest was rekindled when a former colleague of mine, the multi-talented artist David "Peanut" Paramore used to bring a graphics tablet in to work with him a few years ago. The sort of work he produced with it was (and is) incredible and I really wanted to have a go at using a tablet for myself.
So, for Christmas this year, I was delighted to finally receive a Trust TB 5300 graphics tablet. Even after I asked my parents for this, I wasn't actually sure I'd be able to use the thing with GNU/Linux. I had visions of having to take a crash course in C and X programming in order to get the thing to work.
I needn't have worried - the nice thing about the GNU/Linux world is that its users tend to blog about getting unusual bits and bobs working on the operating system, and this was no exception.
A blog called "Dick's Open Source Life", which is written by Dick Thomas, came to my rescue and thanks to this blog post I have the Trust TB 5300 working on Ubuntu Karmic Koala very happily indeed.
Both Inkscape and The GIMP work fine; even pressure sensitivity functioning as expected. I didn't even need to callibrate the tablet as it worked fine out of the box.
In fact, the tablet even works properly when I'm running Macromedia Flash 8 via WINE.
Thanks once again for your help Dick!
Saturday, January 02, 2010
Bakelite Milk Cheques
One of the blogs I follow is Cheeseford, a blog written by the author Louis Barfe. There's always something on there worth seeing, hearing or reading that I wouldn't have stumbled upon otherwise.
A good case in point was today, when Louis linked to a blog called Gypsy Creams, that is run by a friend of his. The blog presents scans of articles and advertisements from women's magazines from the 50s, 60s and 70s.
Quite apart from being filled with beautiful examples of the typography of the period and being very funny, it also very nostalgic. One image on the blog screamed out at me "do an SVG version in Inkscape, quick".
It was the Co-op "clover leaf" logo - something that evokes all sorts of memories from me. Chard High Street was dominated by the Co-op when I was growing up. There was the Co-op dairy, the Co-op furniture and clothes department store and the Co-op supermarket.
My paternal grandmother, who lived in Chard, was an atheist and staunch socialist (she was a very sensible woman - which is probably why she never liked me much) and because of that she liked to use the Co-op as much as possible. I remember the beautiful Bakelite milk cheques on her mantlepiece, the reams of Co-op dividend stamps, the 99 tea she used to buy and the Co-op milk bottles on her doorstep. Most of the things on her kitchen shelves would have the Co-op clover leaf logo on it somewhere.
Anyway, the first thing I did was cut the logo out of the scan from Gypsy Creams using The GIMP. I loaded the scan into Inkscape and then drew the letter O at the top right hand corner. To draw the O, I drew two points, at the top middle and middle left of the O. I then copied and reflected the resulting curve to get the entire outline of the outside of the O. I then copied the outside of the O, and shrank it down in place by holding down Ctrl+Shift as I scaled it with the mouse to create the inner curve.
For the rest of the letters I simply copied the finished letter O on top of them and tweaked them slightly. I drew a triangle for the cut-outs on the P and C and a rectangle to create the descender on the P. A box for the outside and I was finished apart from colouring it in with some suitably faded colours. It took far longer to blog about than to do!
And as for my Granny - well, it seems I'll never escape her. My daughter Mary looks almost exactly like her.
A good case in point was today, when Louis linked to a blog called Gypsy Creams, that is run by a friend of his. The blog presents scans of articles and advertisements from women's magazines from the 50s, 60s and 70s.
Quite apart from being filled with beautiful examples of the typography of the period and being very funny, it also very nostalgic. One image on the blog screamed out at me "do an SVG version in Inkscape, quick".
It was the Co-op "clover leaf" logo - something that evokes all sorts of memories from me. Chard High Street was dominated by the Co-op when I was growing up. There was the Co-op dairy, the Co-op furniture and clothes department store and the Co-op supermarket.
My paternal grandmother, who lived in Chard, was an atheist and staunch socialist (she was a very sensible woman - which is probably why she never liked me much) and because of that she liked to use the Co-op as much as possible. I remember the beautiful Bakelite milk cheques on her mantlepiece, the reams of Co-op dividend stamps, the 99 tea she used to buy and the Co-op milk bottles on her doorstep. Most of the things on her kitchen shelves would have the Co-op clover leaf logo on it somewhere.
Anyway, the first thing I did was cut the logo out of the scan from Gypsy Creams using The GIMP. I loaded the scan into Inkscape and then drew the letter O at the top right hand corner. To draw the O, I drew two points, at the top middle and middle left of the O. I then copied and reflected the resulting curve to get the entire outline of the outside of the O. I then copied the outside of the O, and shrank it down in place by holding down Ctrl+Shift as I scaled it with the mouse to create the inner curve.
The Co-op has asked you all to do some Inkscape...
For the rest of the letters I simply copied the finished letter O on top of them and tweaked them slightly. I drew a triangle for the cut-outs on the P and C and a rectangle to create the descender on the P. A box for the outside and I was finished apart from colouring it in with some suitably faded colours. It took far longer to blog about than to do!
...especially for me!
And as for my Granny - well, it seems I'll never escape her. My daughter Mary looks almost exactly like her.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Repton Through Wine
A couple of days ago I rather glibly said that the PC versions of the computer game Repton ran fine with WINE on the GNU/Linux operating system. That's not quite true, so I thought I'd take a closer look at running Superior Interactive's PC versions of Repton 1, Repton 2 and Repton 3 on GNU/Linux.
I have two computers here. They both run the GNU/Linux operating system with the GNOME desktop and have WINE installed. In case you didn't know, WINE is the little bit of free software magic that lets you run programs written for Microsoft Windows on GNU/Linux, Mac OS, FreeBSD and Solaris. My wife's computer runs the Fedora 12 distribution (or distro) of GNU/Linux and the free nouveau graphics driver. I've installed version 1.1.32 of Wine on my wife's computer. My computer currently runs Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) distro of GNU/Linux with the non-free nVidia driver. It has version 1.1.35 of WINE installed.
WINE 1.1.32 is the version currently available for popular distros such as Ubuntu or Fedora, and will therefore be the version most users are running. WINE 1.1.35 is the very latest version, and instructions on how to obtain it are available here.
The PC Repton games can be run "full screen" or in "windowed" mode, in a window on your desktop. You can toggle between these modes by pressing F10.
Repton 1
On WINE 1.1.32 the game will not run properly in "full screen" mode. It will run in "windowed" mode but suffers from a couple of issues. The first is masking - the masking of sprites and the pointer does not work at all.
The second issue is digits missing from the screen selector boxes on the main menu screen.
On WINE 1.1.35 Repton 1 runs perfectly in "windowed" mode so if you have WINE 1.1.35 or above I can recommend Repton 1 to anyone running GNU/Linux provided you're happy to have the game running in a window.
It also runs reasonably well in "full screen" mode. The sprites are stretched, as no compensation is made for the aspect ratio of my widescreen monitor when making the display full screen. The game also suffers from the masking problems that affected Repton in "windowed" mode on WINE 1.1.32. But it does not suffer from the missing digits on the screen selector boxes that affected WINE 1.1.32.
Apart from the masking issue and the stretched sprites the game plays very well "full screen".
The Repton 1 level and sprite editor works with no issues on both versions of WINE.
Repton 2
On WINE 1.1.32 the game will not run properly in "full screen" mode. It will run in "windowed" mode but suffers from the same masking issue as Repton 1.
On WINE 1.1.35 Repton 2 runs perfectly in "windowed" mode so, again, if you have WINE 1.1.35 or above I can recommend Repton 2 to anyone running GNU/Linux provided you're happy to have the game running in a window.
It also runs reasonably well in "full screen" mode. The sprites are stretched, as again no compensation is made for the aspect ratio of my widescreen monitor when making the display full screen. The game also suffers from the masking problems that affected Repton 1 in "windowed" mode on WINE 1.1.32.
However, unlike Repton 1, it crashes messily on exiting the program having been in full screen mode.
The level and sprite editor works with no issues on both versions of WINE.
Repton 3
The issues with Repton 3 are identical for both versions of WINE.
The game will not at all in "full screen" mode - in fact, selecting it will cause the game to crash messily. It leaves the screen at low resolution as it crashes so you have to either log out and in again.
It will run in "windowed" mode, with issues. The first is that selecting "Run game in high priority mode" will cause the game to crash, and you need to reinstall the game before you can use it again.
The second is selecting the map. If you try and select the map the game will crash. So, Repton 3 will run (and run very well) in Windowed mode provided you don't try and look at the maps.
The level and sprite editor works with no issues on both versions of WINE.
Conclusions
So there you have it. Other than no full screen mode Repton 1 and 2 work well on the latest version of WINE. Repton 3 has a serious fault (the lack of maps) and more minor niggles (no full screen mode, and the crasher upon selecting High Priority mode) but other than that is perfectly playable.
If you have tried to run one of these games with WINE I'd be interested to hear how you got on.
WINE Is Not an Emulator
I have two computers here. They both run the GNU/Linux operating system with the GNOME desktop and have WINE installed. In case you didn't know, WINE is the little bit of free software magic that lets you run programs written for Microsoft Windows on GNU/Linux, Mac OS, FreeBSD and Solaris. My wife's computer runs the Fedora 12 distribution (or distro) of GNU/Linux and the free nouveau graphics driver. I've installed version 1.1.32 of Wine on my wife's computer. My computer currently runs Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) distro of GNU/Linux with the non-free nVidia driver. It has version 1.1.35 of WINE installed.
WINE 1.1.32 is the version currently available for popular distros such as Ubuntu or Fedora, and will therefore be the version most users are running. WINE 1.1.35 is the very latest version, and instructions on how to obtain it are available here.
The PC Repton games can be run "full screen" or in "windowed" mode, in a window on your desktop. You can toggle between these modes by pressing F10.
Repton 1
On WINE 1.1.32 the game will not run properly in "full screen" mode. It will run in "windowed" mode but suffers from a couple of issues. The first is masking - the masking of sprites and the pointer does not work at all.
Repton 1 masking visible on WINE 1.1.32
The second issue is digits missing from the screen selector boxes on the main menu screen.
The boxes at the base should contain digits
On WINE 1.1.35 Repton 1 runs perfectly in "windowed" mode so if you have WINE 1.1.35 or above I can recommend Repton 1 to anyone running GNU/Linux provided you're happy to have the game running in a window.
No masking visible on WINE 1.1.35
And the digits are present on WINE 1.1.35 too
It also runs reasonably well in "full screen" mode. The sprites are stretched, as no compensation is made for the aspect ratio of my widescreen monitor when making the display full screen. The game also suffers from the masking problems that affected Repton in "windowed" mode on WINE 1.1.32. But it does not suffer from the missing digits on the screen selector boxes that affected WINE 1.1.32.
Apart from the masking issue and the stretched sprites the game plays very well "full screen".
The Repton 1 level and sprite editor works with no issues on both versions of WINE.
Repton 2
On WINE 1.1.32 the game will not run properly in "full screen" mode. It will run in "windowed" mode but suffers from the same masking issue as Repton 1.
Repton 1 & 2 have same mask issue on WINE 1.1.32
On WINE 1.1.35 Repton 2 runs perfectly in "windowed" mode so, again, if you have WINE 1.1.35 or above I can recommend Repton 2 to anyone running GNU/Linux provided you're happy to have the game running in a window.
No mask issues on Repton 2 with WINE 1.1.35
It also runs reasonably well in "full screen" mode. The sprites are stretched, as again no compensation is made for the aspect ratio of my widescreen monitor when making the display full screen. The game also suffers from the masking problems that affected Repton 1 in "windowed" mode on WINE 1.1.32.
On exiting Repton 2 from full screen mode
However, unlike Repton 1, it crashes messily on exiting the program having been in full screen mode.
The level and sprite editor works with no issues on both versions of WINE.
Repton 3
The issues with Repton 3 are identical for both versions of WINE.
The game will not at all in "full screen" mode - in fact, selecting it will cause the game to crash messily. It leaves the screen at low resolution as it crashes so you have to either log out and in again.
Repton 3 in "windowed" mode
It will run in "windowed" mode, with issues. The first is that selecting "Run game in high priority mode" will cause the game to crash, and you need to reinstall the game before you can use it again.
The second is selecting the map. If you try and select the map the game will crash. So, Repton 3 will run (and run very well) in Windowed mode provided you don't try and look at the maps.
I told you not to look at the map...
The level and sprite editor works with no issues on both versions of WINE.
Conclusions
So there you have it. Other than no full screen mode Repton 1 and 2 work well on the latest version of WINE. Repton 3 has a serious fault (the lack of maps) and more minor niggles (no full screen mode, and the crasher upon selecting High Priority mode) but other than that is perfectly playable.
If you have tried to run one of these games with WINE I'd be interested to hear how you got on.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
From The North
Recently I had another nice surprise - Michael S. Repton has uploaded a play-through of ROVERS, the Coronation Street theme I created for the BBC Micro version Superior's Repton 3 in the late 1980s, to his YouTube channel.
I've already described the "Rovers" Repton set here, but as always it's fascinating to watch a player as good as Michael tackle my levels.
You can download the "Rovers" theme for the PC version of Repton 3 from here.
I've already described the "Rovers" Repton set here, but as always it's fascinating to watch a player as good as Michael tackle my levels.
You can download the "Rovers" theme for the PC version of Repton 3 from here.
Monday, December 28, 2009
Repton's Silver Jubilee
I've just turned 38, which means I've been a keen Repton fan for 24 years. It seems incredible, but next year is Repton's Silver Jubilee.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, if you look through the Blog Archive you'll see I've talked about the computer game Repton several times: both the cover art and graphics I've done recently for Retro Software and also some of the screens and graphics I designed on my BBC Micro back in the 80s.
This time of year - Christmas and my birthday - always makes me think of Repton. Waiting for Christmas 1986 was almost unbearable as it was then I was going to get a copy of the latest Repton release, Repton 3. I didn't have a disc drive at the time, so my copy of Repton 3 would be on cassette tape for the BBC Micro.
The excitement was because, for the first time ever, I was going to be able to design my own levels and graphics for the game and I couldn't wait. I only had a couple of C15 cassette tapes to store my levels at first, and I as I designed levels and graphics I'd save over my previous work again and again. And sometimes a quirk of the cassette recorder volume or tone control meant that the file wouldn't save properly. I dread to think of the number of levels and character designs I lost.
However, one of the very first levels I designed that Christmas I was so pleased with it just seemed to hang around and hang around and I still have it to this day. The password for the level is "TIMOTHY" - named after my pet goat at the time and it was always screen G (for Goat).
I actually could only complete this level with great difficulty for many years - I used to be happy if only I died twice when completing it.
Eventually, using information I'd gleaned in a Hac-Man article in The Micro User I culled all the easy levels I'd created on various tapes and 5.25" floppies into one set - Set1.
Set1 also featured a customised set of graphics. I was very disappointed with the graphics in Repton 3. This was because they didn't look like the abandoned diamond mine on the cover art. They were all clean and clinical and didn't have much character. So I sat in front of Repton 2 with coloured pencils and recorded every sprite faithfully on graph paper.
Then I entered all the character designs into the Repton 3 editor - a process that took a very long time and was rather difficult on a fuzzy Microvitec CUB CRT monitor.
Recently I've been thoroughly enjoying the Repton level play throughs posted onto YouTube by SentinelProxima, ReptonGeek and TestPilotMonkey. SentinelProxima is the YouTube channel name of Michael S. Repton, undoubtedly the world's best Repton player.
I was curious to see how Michael would tackle Screen G, as I take an age to complete the level even now. Michael very kindly produced a long playthrough of all the screens.
The first four levels are completed here:
And the second four levels are completed here:
It was incredible to watch Michael complete my levels - all far more elegantly and with greater efficiency than I could ever manage. As I've said before, the effect of watching someone so good play Repton is as compulsive as watching a 147 break in snooker. It really was a pleasure to watch, and it was a truly fantastic birthday present.
Lovingly prepared new versions of Repton 1, Repton 2, Repton 3 and Repton Spectacular are available to buy for the Microsoft Windows operating system from Superior Interactive. And, for those lucky enough to use the GNU/Linux operating system, you'll be pleased to hear all three games work reasonably well with WINE.
You can download my levels for Repton 3 for the PC version of Repton 3 from here.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, if you look through the Blog Archive you'll see I've talked about the computer game Repton several times: both the cover art and graphics I've done recently for Retro Software and also some of the screens and graphics I designed on my BBC Micro back in the 80s.
This time of year - Christmas and my birthday - always makes me think of Repton. Waiting for Christmas 1986 was almost unbearable as it was then I was going to get a copy of the latest Repton release, Repton 3. I didn't have a disc drive at the time, so my copy of Repton 3 would be on cassette tape for the BBC Micro.
The excitement was because, for the first time ever, I was going to be able to design my own levels and graphics for the game and I couldn't wait. I only had a couple of C15 cassette tapes to store my levels at first, and I as I designed levels and graphics I'd save over my previous work again and again. And sometimes a quirk of the cassette recorder volume or tone control meant that the file wouldn't save properly. I dread to think of the number of levels and character designs I lost.
However, one of the very first levels I designed that Christmas I was so pleased with it just seemed to hang around and hang around and I still have it to this day. The password for the level is "TIMOTHY" - named after my pet goat at the time and it was always screen G (for Goat).
Screen G - TIMOTHY
I actually could only complete this level with great difficulty for many years - I used to be happy if only I died twice when completing it.
Eventually, using information I'd gleaned in a Hac-Man article in The Micro User I culled all the easy levels I'd created on various tapes and 5.25" floppies into one set - Set1.
Set1 also featured a customised set of graphics. I was very disappointed with the graphics in Repton 3. This was because they didn't look like the abandoned diamond mine on the cover art. They were all clean and clinical and didn't have much character. So I sat in front of Repton 2 with coloured pencils and recorded every sprite faithfully on graph paper.
My original drawings from 1986
Then I entered all the character designs into the Repton 3 editor - a process that took a very long time and was rather difficult on a fuzzy Microvitec CUB CRT monitor.
The graphics entered into Repton 3
Recently I've been thoroughly enjoying the Repton level play throughs posted onto YouTube by SentinelProxima, ReptonGeek and TestPilotMonkey. SentinelProxima is the YouTube channel name of Michael S. Repton, undoubtedly the world's best Repton player.
I was curious to see how Michael would tackle Screen G, as I take an age to complete the level even now. Michael very kindly produced a long playthrough of all the screens.
The first four levels are completed here:
And the second four levels are completed here:
It was incredible to watch Michael complete my levels - all far more elegantly and with greater efficiency than I could ever manage. As I've said before, the effect of watching someone so good play Repton is as compulsive as watching a 147 break in snooker. It really was a pleasure to watch, and it was a truly fantastic birthday present.
Lovingly prepared new versions of Repton 1, Repton 2, Repton 3 and Repton Spectacular are available to buy for the Microsoft Windows operating system from Superior Interactive. And, for those lucky enough to use the GNU/Linux operating system, you'll be pleased to hear all three games work reasonably well with WINE.
You can download my levels for Repton 3 for the PC version of Repton 3 from here.
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Saturday, December 05, 2009
But what's it for?
When I posted about my VHS and PAL plug-ins for The GIMP, I forgot to say why I originally wrote them. As I was using the VHS plug-in last night, I thought it might be interesting to explain what I was using it for.
I often find myself taking captions found on old multi-generation VHS tapes, and trying to recreate them in Inkscape (or, in the old days, in Macromedia Flash).
The trouble is that VHS changes can change the way captions appear. In particular, it changes the way the text on captions appears. This makes it very hard to match the typefaces used on captions with ones I have in TrueType, Postcript or OpenType format.
Take this caption, for example (click on it to make it bigger).
When I saw it, I knew immediately that the "PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT" text was in Compacta Bold. However, when you create the caption in Inkscape it simply doesn't look right (click on it to make it bigger).
As you can see, the text looks so much thicker it's almost as if I've used the wrong font weight. But I know that the text is not Compacta Medium - that would be far too thin. And I also know there were no other weights of Compacta available to Scraggie and his friends in the Mecanorma or Letraset dry transfer lettering catalogues in the 1970s. So what's going on?
If I load the Inkscape caption into The GIMP and put it through my VHS filter, which reproduces the mangling that VHS inflicts on television pictures, you get something that looks like this.
The weight of the font in the caption above looks more like the original - and I've clearly used the right typeface all along.
The Southern Television logo is used courtesy of Nic Ayling.
I often find myself taking captions found on old multi-generation VHS tapes, and trying to recreate them in Inkscape (or, in the old days, in Macromedia Flash).
The trouble is that VHS changes can change the way captions appear. In particular, it changes the way the text on captions appears. This makes it very hard to match the typefaces used on captions with ones I have in TrueType, Postcript or OpenType format.
Take this caption, for example (click on it to make it bigger).
Could you help someone coping with franchise loss?
When I saw it, I knew immediately that the "PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT" text was in Compacta Bold. However, when you create the caption in Inkscape it simply doesn't look right (click on it to make it bigger).
Together we can beat pipe smoking.
As you can see, the text looks so much thicker it's almost as if I've used the wrong font weight. But I know that the text is not Compacta Medium - that would be far too thin. And I also know there were no other weights of Compacta available to Scraggie and his friends in the Mecanorma or Letraset dry transfer lettering catalogues in the 1970s. So what's going on?
If I load the Inkscape caption into The GIMP and put it through my VHS filter, which reproduces the mangling that VHS inflicts on television pictures, you get something that looks like this.
Dinage isn't the problem it was.
The weight of the font in the caption above looks more like the original - and I've clearly used the right typeface all along.
The Southern Television logo is used courtesy of Nic Ayling.
Tuesday, December 01, 2009
Hey Jemima let's go popping....
Having got heartily fed up of Ubuntu GNU/Linux snap, crackling and popping at me at the slightest provocation, I ended up looking for a solution. After a quick Google I found the answer. It turns out I'm having this audio issue because Ubuntu is utilising a power saving "feature" of Intel integrated sound hardware.
At the command line, if you type:
And then comment out the following line in the gedit window that appears by putting a hash (#) symbol in front of it:
You'll find that, after a reboot, there's no more popping.
I've also finally discovered a music player program for GNU/Linux that does exactly what I want. It's called Quod Libet, and comes with an excellent piece of tagging software called Ex Falso.
I've found it to be utterly fantastic for people like me who like to organise and tag their music to an inch of its life.
At the command line, if you type:
gksu gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf
And then comment out the following line in the gedit window that appears by putting a hash (#) symbol in front of it:
options snd-hda-intel power_save=10 power_save_controller=N
You'll find that, after a reboot, there's no more popping.
I've also finally discovered a music player program for GNU/Linux that does exactly what I want. It's called Quod Libet, and comes with an excellent piece of tagging software called Ex Falso.
What exquisite taste this man has.
I've found it to be utterly fantastic for people like me who like to organise and tag their music to an inch of its life.
Inkscape 0.47 Out Now!
One of the jewels of free software is the vector graphics editing program Inkscape. Inkscape is based on the W3C Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. The SVG format is very exciting and as well as vector graphics includes both fonts and animation - at the rate Inkscape is implementing the features of the SVG specification it won't be long before Adobe's Flash has serious competition.
Inkscape 0.47 has now been released. I've been using betas of the new version for some time now, and one of the attractions of the betas were the new vector effects filters.
For instance, take a copy of my vanilla flavoured TVS .svg file:
Now add "Chrome Dark". In one mouse click you've got something very nice indeed. You can click to enlarge the image below:
One thing I would recommend when playing with the filters (and which is a bit counter-intuitive seeing as Inkscape is a vector editor), is seeing what effect you get if you make your drawing bigger - much bigger in fact. Some filters seem to work best on larger images.
Inkscape is available for the GNU/Linux, Windows and Mac OS X operating systems and if you haven't already downloaded it I strongly recommend that you do so.
Meanwhile, I'm off to play some more!
The TVS logo was originally designed by John Haiman. The TVS logo and TVS name are registered trademarks of TVS Television Productions, Vinters Park, Maidstone, Kent, ME14 5NZ.
Inkscape 0.47 has now been released. I've been using betas of the new version for some time now, and one of the attractions of the betas were the new vector effects filters.
For instance, take a copy of my vanilla flavoured TVS .svg file:
Daring, dazzling, death-defyingly dull, divinely decadent...
Now add "Chrome Dark". In one mouse click you've got something very nice indeed. You can click to enlarge the image below:
TVS + Chrome Dark filter
One thing I would recommend when playing with the filters (and which is a bit counter-intuitive seeing as Inkscape is a vector editor), is seeing what effect you get if you make your drawing bigger - much bigger in fact. Some filters seem to work best on larger images.
Inkscape is available for the GNU/Linux, Windows and Mac OS X operating systems and if you haven't already downloaded it I strongly recommend that you do so.
Meanwhile, I'm off to play some more!
The TVS logo was originally designed by John Haiman. The TVS logo and TVS name are registered trademarks of TVS Television Productions, Vinters Park, Maidstone, Kent, ME14 5NZ.
Running Rampant
Yesterday was St. Andrew's Day, so I thought I'd listen to some Al Stewart whilst I did something related to Scottish Television - the company whose license to print money predated Quantitative Easing by quite some margin.
Here it is - traced by hand in Inkscape, from a scan of an original STV pasteboard (courtesy of Gareth Randall).
It's interesting, but I've found all the recent work I've been doing on fonts has helped me enormously in hand tracing complex shapes such as this accurately.
Here it is - traced by hand in Inkscape, from a scan of an original STV pasteboard (courtesy of Gareth Randall).
What's on Channel Ten, hen?
It's interesting, but I've found all the recent work I've been doing on fonts has helped me enormously in hand tracing complex shapes such as this accurately.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Watching DVDs on Ubuntu
Many moons ago I published a post about my problems in playing DVDs in Ubuntu GNU/Linux. The main problem was that I simply couldn't. Which is quite a big problem, particularly for me.
Well, now I can without going through the hoops I posted about last time. Thanks to the updated version of the Linux kernal found in the latest version of Ubuntu, the fix for UDF now actually works. To apply it you need to change a file you find in
You need root privileges to write to this file, so to get them I opened it up in the gedit Text Editor using the sudo command.
sudo /usr/bin/gedit /etc/fstab
Then I commented out the line that read:
By putting a hash (#) symbol in front of it and then added a line underneath it that read:
This should be all one line. Once that is done, video DVDs will actually mount, and you can actually play them.
I had another problem with video in Ubuntu, and that was Totem never seems to be able to work out the duration of a VOB or MPG video file. It thinks no MPG file is longer than about 24 seconds. Mind you, that's about four times the average attention span these days, which is probably why the bug hasn't been picked up yet.
I fixed this by the simple expedient of installing the excellent free software media player VLC. It particularly excels with video, and allows me to have lovely jittery interlaced fields using the Video -> Deinterlace -> Linear option.
Well, now I can without going through the hoops I posted about last time. Thanks to the updated version of the Linux kernal found in the latest version of Ubuntu, the fix for UDF now actually works. To apply it you need to change a file you find in
/etc/fstab
You need root privileges to write to this file, so to get them I opened it up in the gedit Text Editor using the sudo command.
sudo /usr/bin/gedit /etc/fstab
Then I commented out the line that read:
/dev/scd0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0
By putting a hash (#) symbol in front of it and then added a line underneath it that read:
/dev/scd0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 users,noauto,uid=0,gid=46,mode=0777,dmode=0777,nosuid,noexec 0 0
This should be all one line. Once that is done, video DVDs will actually mount, and you can actually play them.
Now I can watch DVDs just like this one!
I had another problem with video in Ubuntu, and that was Totem never seems to be able to work out the duration of a VOB or MPG video file. It thinks no MPG file is longer than about 24 seconds. Mind you, that's about four times the average attention span these days, which is probably why the bug hasn't been picked up yet.
I fixed this by the simple expedient of installing the excellent free software media player VLC. It particularly excels with video, and allows me to have lovely jittery interlaced fields using the Video -> Deinterlace -> Linear option.
What a waste of time...
This morning, I stumbled upon...
http://new.myfonts.com/fonts/profonts/sportowy/
Head -> Desk -> Head -> Desk -> Head -> Desk.
And it's about fifty times better than the version I did.
Head -> Desk -> Head -> Desk -> Head -> Desk.
If I had known I wouldn't have bothered.
Head -> Desk -> Head -> Desk -> Head -> Desk.
Look how elegant the sportowy @ sign is, and the sportowy circumflex and breve, and how they managed to get the inner stroke proportions correct as they had decent source material to work from...
Head -> Desk -> Head -> Desk -> Head -> Desk.
And overhead a rainbow appeared. In black and white.
http://new.myfonts.com/fonts/profonts/sportowy/
Head -> Desk -> Head -> Desk -> Head -> Desk.
And it's about fifty times better than the version I did.
Head -> Desk -> Head -> Desk -> Head -> Desk.
If I had known I wouldn't have bothered.
Head -> Desk -> Head -> Desk -> Head -> Desk.
Look how elegant the sportowy @ sign is, and the sportowy circumflex and breve, and how they managed to get the inner stroke proportions correct as they had decent source material to work from...
Head -> Desk -> Head -> Desk -> Head -> Desk.
And overhead a rainbow appeared. In black and white.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
The Final Scene
I've finally finished my Scene.ttf font (which you can find out more about here and here). I added all the glyphs I think I'll ever want to add to it - I'm sick of it now! Mind you I enjoyed delving into the strange world of macrons, ligatures, ogoneks, cedillas and breves. That is, I enjoyed it until I had to produce dozens and dozens of glyphs using the damn things!
As you can see from the FontForge font view window below, there are rather a lot. You can click on the picture to make it bigger.
After I added Hungarian characters, I also wanted to add Welsh and once I had added Welsh I thought I might as well add the lot. The font is in truetype format, but because of all the extra characters it now uses the Unicode BMP encoding.
I showed my Scene font to a friend of mind called John Livens. He is a retired printer (and also an excellent painter). He said:
Right, I'm off for a lie down...
As you can see from the FontForge font view window below, there are rather a lot. You can click on the picture to make it bigger.
Dave's fuller house
After I added Hungarian characters, I also wanted to add Welsh and once I had added Welsh I thought I might as well add the lot. The font is in truetype format, but because of all the extra characters it now uses the Unicode BMP encoding.
I showed my Scene font to a friend of mind called John Livens. He is a retired printer (and also an excellent painter). He said:
OXFORD!!!! I remember it well. If you’ve ever tried to rub down a line of Letraset, especially an old sheet of Letraset, you’ll not forget Oxford...Anyway, now you can use something approaching the old Letraset Oxford face in the comfort of your own home without having to worry about inking the gaps in broken lines with pen or running out of "e"'s. The finished font is licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence 1.1 and can be downloaded from here.
Right, I'm off for a lie down...
Friday, November 13, 2009
Making more of a Scene...
After producing Version v.0.001 of my Scene font (my version of the Letraset Oxford typeface) I found all the empty glyph spaces I was left with in the FontForge Font View window rather unsatisfying. It felt like the font was only half finished.
The trouble was that I'd created all the glyphs that had appeared in the original Letraset Oxford face, so if I wanted to add all of the missing glyphs I'd have design them myself - in particular, I'd need to design the whole of the upper case. Despite worrying what on earth I'd end up with, I fired up Inkscape and decided to have a go.
There were some letters such as B or D where I thought it was pretty clear what an upper case version would look like. The font as a whole reminded me of the plastic stencils I used to have as a child which contained what looked like German DIN rounded faces.
The first test I did was the upper case A. I used the same angle of slope as the lower case letter v in the original Letraset Oxford face and the same height as the lower case letter letter l. The only decision then was where to place the cross bar on the A, and though I did toy with making it an extension of the horizontal line that joins up the letters in the end I decided to put it higher up, where I thought it looked best.
However, when I came to the D and B I found it far more problematic to get them looking right. The lower-case letters look like a condensed face and are quite rectangular, so one problem I faced was to get the right width to height ratio. It took several attempts to get the D correct.
Once I'd sorted out the D, the B was even worse. The main feature of the Oxford face is the line that threads all the letter and number glyphs together. The lower case letters were designed to keep the area around the horizontal threading line as clear as possible, and therefore my first thought was to make the line that bisects the B as high as possible. However, this ruined the readability that is such an important part of the font, and also made it look rather 1930s instead of 1960s/70s.
You'll notice in the B and D examples above that I also had to make all the right angles rounded in order to make the face look consistent.
The next problem was the letter E. There were two considerations here. First, there was the fact that the lower case e in the original Letraset Oxford face was one of the most distinctive features of the face, and I wanted the upper case E to be distinctive as well. The second problem was that pesky threading horizontal line.
The bottom bar of the capital E was going to interfere with this, and I really didn't want that to happen on such a commonly used letter. I decided I needed some kind of rounded E, but I had a four attempts before I settled on my third design.
An identical problem was presented by the letters L and Z. In the original Letraset face they just ignored the problem and let the bottom of the lower case z and the threading line clash with each other. So for the upper case Z I just did that too. For the L I did experiment with having a rounded bottom, but it looked dreadful and therefore created another clashing horizontal monstrosity.
One of the most distinctive features of the original Letraset Oxford font was the rounded bottom on the lower case letter w. I like a nice rounded bottom, so I decided to keep that feature in the upper case letter W.
If you tried version v.0.002 of scene.ttf you'll know that the face is proportionally spaced, but it is not kerned. That means that the spacing can appear odd with certain letter combinations. This is unavoidable, as most font renderers make a rather horrible effect on the threading horizontal stripe if you try to kern letter pairs closer together.
The spacings on the lower case are the same as on the dry transfer lettering version of the Letraset Oxford face. The spacings on the upper case are my best attempt at being as useful as possible, but in some circumstances the kerning won't look right. However, this is easy to fix if you using the font in a tool such as Inkscape.
Another distinctive feature of the Letraset Oxford typeface is that the numeric glyphs are not full height, but are the same height as the lower case letters. This meant that I made all the symbols that are used mainly in connection with the number glyphs look best when used with the rather small numbers. This includes the vulgar fractions, the currency symbols, the degree sign, the multiply and divide signs and the ordinal indicators. This means they may not look very good when used with upper case letters, but I hope what I've done is the best compromise.
Hopefully you'll appreciate what I did with the plus, minus and equals symbol. They can either be used "threaded" with no gaps between them and digits, or they can be used with "capped" ends so that they can be used with spaces. The example below shows both, and the sequence of letters needed to create each string.
The @ or "at" character was a tricky one to design. I thought that the main usage of it these days would be to create e-mail addresses, so I designed it to look best in email addresses made up of lower case characters. This means it doesn't look very nice in strings of upper case letters. However it does look fine when used with digits, which is the other place you would expect it to be used.
When I came to create accented versions of my newly designed upper case glyphs I got a rather nasty surprise. With acute or grave accents my characters are too high. In TrueType or Postscript fonts glyphs should not normally appear above the 819 pixel mark. In the picture below the top horizontal rule is at 819 pixels - and my acute accent goes over this by quite some margin! This was caused by my inexperience and next time I create a typeface I'll ensure that the accented characters are a legal height.
Creating accented versions in FontForge is very easy, as you can copy references to characters and accents so that you only need to describe each part of a glyph once. The capital O with an acute accent is made up of a reference to the O character and a reference to the acute accent which means that if I want to change either the O or the acute accent they will automagically be changed everywhere else too. Of course, as another bonus this also saves space too.
A glyph that I'm not very happy with and am still thinking about is the capital letter Ash. The letter Ash is the letter A joined to the letter E to make Æ. I particularly wanted the letter Ash to look nice because my favourite band is called Mæstoso. However, The problem I faced was joining my rounded capital E to a non-rounded A - the end result is a bit too narrow for my taste.
The finished v.0.002 of my Scene.ttf font contains all of the glyphs in the Latin1 (ISO8859-1) character set.
As I have said before, I want to add Hungarian characters with double acute accents and also a Euro symbol to the Scene face. To do whis I need to add the glyphs in the Latin0 (ISO/IEC 8859-15) and Latin2 (ISO8859-2) character sets. I plan to do that in v.0.003 as and when I get the time and write another blog post when that version is ready.
Meanwhile, version v.0.002 is licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence 1.1 and can be downloaded from here.
More free spaces than a Cheeky Girls gig
The trouble was that I'd created all the glyphs that had appeared in the original Letraset Oxford face, so if I wanted to add all of the missing glyphs I'd have design them myself - in particular, I'd need to design the whole of the upper case. Despite worrying what on earth I'd end up with, I fired up Inkscape and decided to have a go.
There were some letters such as B or D where I thought it was pretty clear what an upper case version would look like. The font as a whole reminded me of the plastic stencils I used to have as a child which contained what looked like German DIN rounded faces.
The first test I did was the upper case A. I used the same angle of slope as the lower case letter v in the original Letraset Oxford face and the same height as the lower case letter letter l. The only decision then was where to place the cross bar on the A, and though I did toy with making it an extension of the horizontal line that joins up the letters in the end I decided to put it higher up, where I thought it looked best.
Eh?
However, when I came to the D and B I found it far more problematic to get them looking right. The lower-case letters look like a condensed face and are quite rectangular, so one problem I faced was to get the right width to height ratio. It took several attempts to get the D correct.
I could do with a D...
Once I'd sorted out the D, the B was even worse. The main feature of the Oxford face is the line that threads all the letter and number glyphs together. The lower case letters were designed to keep the area around the horizontal threading line as clear as possible, and therefore my first thought was to make the line that bisects the B as high as possible. However, this ruined the readability that is such an important part of the font, and also made it look rather 1930s instead of 1960s/70s.
To B or not to B?
You'll notice in the B and D examples above that I also had to make all the right angles rounded in order to make the face look consistent.
The next problem was the letter E. There were two considerations here. First, there was the fact that the lower case e in the original Letraset Oxford face was one of the most distinctive features of the face, and I wanted the upper case E to be distinctive as well. The second problem was that pesky threading horizontal line.
The bottom bar of the capital E was going to interfere with this, and I really didn't want that to happen on such a commonly used letter. I decided I needed some kind of rounded E, but I had a four attempts before I settled on my third design.
E's are good. Well, one of them is.
An identical problem was presented by the letters L and Z. In the original Letraset face they just ignored the problem and let the bottom of the lower case z and the threading line clash with each other. So for the upper case Z I just did that too. For the L I did experiment with having a rounded bottom, but it looked dreadful and therefore created another clashing horizontal monstrosity.
L no! L yes!
One of the most distinctive features of the original Letraset Oxford font was the rounded bottom on the lower case letter w. I like a nice rounded bottom, so I decided to keep that feature in the upper case letter W.
Nice rounded bottoms
If you tried version v.0.002 of scene.ttf you'll know that the face is proportionally spaced, but it is not kerned. That means that the spacing can appear odd with certain letter combinations. This is unavoidable, as most font renderers make a rather horrible effect on the threading horizontal stripe if you try to kern letter pairs closer together.
An ugly Kern. And I don't mean András.
The spacings on the lower case are the same as on the dry transfer lettering version of the Letraset Oxford face. The spacings on the upper case are my best attempt at being as useful as possible, but in some circumstances the kerning won't look right. However, this is easy to fix if you using the font in a tool such as Inkscape.
Another distinctive feature of the Letraset Oxford typeface is that the numeric glyphs are not full height, but are the same height as the lower case letters. This meant that I made all the symbols that are used mainly in connection with the number glyphs look best when used with the rather small numbers. This includes the vulgar fractions, the currency symbols, the degree sign, the multiply and divide signs and the ordinal indicators. This means they may not look very good when used with upper case letters, but I hope what I've done is the best compromise.
Hopefully you'll appreciate what I did with the plus, minus and equals symbol. They can either be used "threaded" with no gaps between them and digits, or they can be used with "capped" ends so that they can be used with spaces. The example below shows both, and the sequence of letters needed to create each string.
Johnny Ball stuff
The @ or "at" character was a tricky one to design. I thought that the main usage of it these days would be to create e-mail addresses, so I designed it to look best in email addresses made up of lower case characters. This means it doesn't look very nice in strings of upper case letters. However it does look fine when used with digits, which is the other place you would expect it to be used.
Where it's at
When I came to create accented versions of my newly designed upper case glyphs I got a rather nasty surprise. With acute or grave accents my characters are too high. In TrueType or Postscript fonts glyphs should not normally appear above the 819 pixel mark. In the picture below the top horizontal rule is at 819 pixels - and my acute accent goes over this by quite some margin! This was caused by my inexperience and next time I create a typeface I'll ensure that the accented characters are a legal height.
Oh, too high...
Creating accented versions in FontForge is very easy, as you can copy references to characters and accents so that you only need to describe each part of a glyph once. The capital O with an acute accent is made up of a reference to the O character and a reference to the acute accent which means that if I want to change either the O or the acute accent they will automagically be changed everywhere else too. Of course, as another bonus this also saves space too.
A glyph that I'm not very happy with and am still thinking about is the capital letter Ash. The letter Ash is the letter A joined to the letter E to make Æ. I particularly wanted the letter Ash to look nice because my favourite band is called Mæstoso. However, The problem I faced was joining my rounded capital E to a non-rounded A - the end result is a bit too narrow for my taste.
Gone Ash tray - (the letter, not the material)
The finished v.0.002 of my Scene.ttf font contains all of the glyphs in the Latin1 (ISO8859-1) character set.
Dave's Full House
As I have said before, I want to add Hungarian characters with double acute accents and also a Euro symbol to the Scene face. To do whis I need to add the glyphs in the Latin0 (ISO/IEC 8859-15) and Latin2 (ISO8859-2) character sets. I plan to do that in v.0.003 as and when I get the time and write another blog post when that version is ready.
Meanwhile, version v.0.002 is licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence 1.1 and can be downloaded from here.
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