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Idea for a similar font creation app

Open DDBE12 opened this issue 1 year ago • 0 comments

Hey there, I have an idea for a similar app. I basically wanna clone Comstock, an ancient analogue typeface created around 1900, which has long since passed into the public domain.

For this purpose, I've made scans of book covers where it was used, and I've made hundreds of single hi-rez PNGs with alpha transparency of characters, artificially re-created at a high resolution (1000x1000; sometimes extended to 1200 on either dimension for special characters) in Corel Paint Shop Pro (both uppercase and lowercase, for regular Latin, other European languages, Greek, Cyrillic, math operators, currency symbols...).

Note that for some letters, chars, or symbols (comma, Q, German ß), I've chosen to slightly deviate from the original Comstock design, and that I'm adding many more characters and symbols in the original Comstock style that were never part of the original charset. (Also, some smaller symbols like comma are centered on the canvas, rather than being at the bottom or wherever they should be.)

Also note that Comstock is special in having two outer contour lines, one black, one white. I don't mind if that means either black or white will end up transparent in the eventual TTF result, as it happens with commercial glyph tracers.

I'd like to be able to drop all those hundreds of PNG characters (maybe as a ZIP?) onto an app similar to the one you've made already, and also add a few scans as JPGs on top, in order to help the AI understand how it's supposed to look in detail in practice (relative heights, relative placements, spacing, etc.). I don't mind if I'll have to additionally type in for each character which character it is (akin to how you have to do it on online font recognition tools).

With that, the tool should then trace the letters and turn it into a TTF font.

DDBE12 avatar Oct 17 '24 13:10 DDBE12