The tg Font Collaboration Thread

[adamtwar]

Great effort.

I've taken a look at the most recent version of the Celebrated Burgeon Ornaments TG font. I think it’s a great effort, and the choice of assigning the glyphs to the plain ASCII codes is a reasonable one. The TTF format has a special way of encoding symbol fonts but I think it’s not a very reliable mechanism and is confusing to users. Also, the Symbol font encoding is not supported by OTF, so it’s very difficult to release a font with compatible encoding in both OTF and TTF.

I also definitely support the idea of releasing the font under the SIL Open Font License.

For the opensource Lato font which I helped my friend Łukasz Dziedzic release, we’ve done the following:

In FontLab Studio’s Copyright information section, in the "Copyright" field, we’ve entered:

"Copyright (c) 2010-2011 by tyPoland Lukasz Dziedzic with Reserved Font Name "Lato". Licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1."

In the "Notice/Description" field, we’ve entered:

"Lato is a sanserif typeface family designed in the Summer 2010 by Warsaw-based designer Lukasz Dziedzic ("Lato" means "Summer" in Polish). It tries to carefully balance some potentially conflicting priorities: it should seem quite "transparent" when used in body text but would display some original traits when used in larger sizes. The classical proportions, particularly visible in the uppercase, give the letterforms familiar harmony and elegance. At the same time, its sleek sanserif look makes evident the fact that Lato was designed in 2010, even though it does not follow any current trend. The semi-rounded details of the letters give Lato a feeling of warmth, while the strong structure provides stability and seriousness."

In the License information section, in the "License" field, we’ve entered:

"Copyright (c) 2010-2011 by tyPoland Lukasz Dziedzic (http://www.typoland.com/) with Reserved Font Name "Lato". Licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)."

In the License URL field, we've entered:

"http://scripts.sil.org/OFL"

So my recommendation would be to write some short story in the Notice/Description field, and format the Copyright and License fields with the addition: with Reserved Font Name "Celebrated Burgeon Ornaments TG". This is a good hint to other font developers that if they wanted to extend the font, they'd need to change the name (as per terms of the OFL).

Best regards,
Adam

[Gare]

Thank you, Adam!

This will be of great help and a wonderful information point for the group.

This is a fairly large typeface, over 100K as Opentype. This is sort of a regret, and looking backwards (where one's vision is always 20/20) I'd have provided simpler glyphs to trace. My feeling is that a certain point, it's wiser to distribute designs as native vector pages (Xara, Illustrator, and so on) instead of embedding them in a font. The font loads quickly for you and is usable?

I didn't code the font as Symbol, because we're a Xara-oriented group, and Xara Designer doesn't make distinctions with certain types of coding. Example: Xara Designer cannot distinguish between Demi and Bold, at least this hasn't been my experience. If I declare a font as Demibold, and another one as Bold in the same family, Xara will not see one or the other. It could be my inexpertise, but I don't think so, because I cannot load and then see all the members of the Linotype render of Futura.



That's a problem for another day, though.

Thank you again for your info and participation here!

My Best,

Gary

[Soquili]

Adam thank you very much for your advice it is very helpful.

[Soquili]

Frances I am reading the SIL OFL and the information about the FONTLOG.

I should have something ready later today.

[mwenz]

Mike, I just had a look at the PDF, it doesn't match the last posted version of the font

What didn't match up would have been nice to know.

From what I could see, there was an extra ! mark and an old character left from one of the previous, previous, previous iterations.

If anyone sees more differences, please note what they are.

Take care, Mike

[angelize]

Thanks Mike for the corrected Pdf it looks great! Apologies for not pointing out what didn't match.

OK so this is what we will have for the upload package:

• the open type font file
• the true type font file
• the OFL
• the OFLFAQ.text

and when Bill gets finished with the FONTLOG.txt we will have that.

Bill also would you mind taking a look at the last posted version of the font and the post by Adam and make any changes to the font information and font license fields you think are necessary? I am asking that we let Bill do this to keep confusion down.

I am going to post the key guide pdf separately in the same thread for a couple of reasons, one being I may need to keep the file size of the zip file down to keep within forum limits(I haven't checked that yet) and two as Gary mentioned it will possibly get stripped by other font download sites eventually so this will be a way to encourage folks to come to TG and get the whole package here.

Everyone: pat yourselves on the back for a job well done! I thank one and all for your contributions!

Once Bill posts the finalized font files with the proper info in the aforementioned fields and the FONTLOG.txt I'll prepare the download package and make the gallery post, and once that is done we can all move on to the next projects

[Soquili]

Frances I have incorporated the suggestions that Adam made into the FontLab file.

The attached .zip contains the FontLab VFB, TTF, OTF, files along with Mike's PDF, and the ChangLog.txt file.

[Soquili]

If need be I can create a .zipx compressed file but I do not know how many people use WinZip which would be required to open the archive.

[Barbara B]

I think that we should keep it plain zip. That way Mac and Linux, etc. can open without any problem -- and our font will be going out to the world at large.

[Soquili]

Thanks Barbara that is what I thought but made the offer if a much smaller archive was required.

7zip a free archival application that can also make a smaller archive file and is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows.