This is my 3rd attempt at a compressed font. Hopefully it’s progressing in the right direction!

Does anyone know why random kerns aren’t retained in the downloaded font? I’ve had this problem in my other fontstructions too.

Another problem that I’ve been having with Fontstruct is that there’s no way to fully remove a character once you’ve placed a block on it. For instance, I originally made a “Њ” for IITO, which I removed, but it still tries to render it even though there’s nothing there. It would be better if it didn’t contain that codepoint at all so that it could fall back to another font for that character.

@thalamic

Thanks. The only descender would have been in Q, and none of the rounded characters were going under the baseline anyway, so I thought I’d make it a rule. The only other character it really affected was the comma though. It has a slight benefit when using the font in graphic design software, because it makes it easier to snap to the real baseline. If I use it in an interface, I also don’t need to account for overhang, so there’s less to worry about.

Kerning is turned on in LibreOffice Writer. It’s only some combinations that don’t kern properly. And I don’t think it has anything to do with LibreOffice Writer specifically, because I tested it in a webpage and it’s rendering in the same way there too. Possibly the problem lies in a shared text rendering dependency in my operating system, but I doubt it. I remember the problem occurring when I was on MacOS as well. So I’m pretty confident the problem is in the conversion from Fontstruct’s internal data format to ttf and otf (both have the problem).

@Bryndan W. Meyerholt (BWM)

Good to see you again

1: That’s weird, because punctuation kerns just fine with Cyrillic even though it’s in the Basic Latin block.

2: Thanks. That’s a big help!

3: I don’t plan on adding any other letters with diacritics.

@Rob Meek (meek)

Thankyou for bestowing unto me this unexpected honour!

@Goatmeal

I knew you’d get the reference!

@hakaqvi_272j

I don’t understand.

@Forty-One

That much I could get from Google Translate. But I still don’t understand.

@Frodo7

Thanks

1: E and F may seem too big, but they actually have the same proportions as they do in other typefaces such as Helvetica Ultra Compressed, Swiss 911 Ultra Compressed, and Antonio. I reduced their width by an 8th of a block for you, but that’s as much as I can do before they start looking absurdly thin when used in actual words.

M and N were purposefully wider than usual because I wanted their outermost strokes to be the same width as the vertical strokes of every other letter. That way, it’s nicer to use in graphic design if I want to align those strokes with those of other letters. But now I see that people like you are just going to complain about it, so I changed them to be what you’d expect.

2: I have no idea what your point is supposed to be.

3: It completely depends on the context. This is not a decorative font. In the contexts I intended this font for, nobody would be expecting O to be stylised at all in the first place, so they wouldn’t even think to interpret it as such. The Q in IITO isn’t even much different from the Q in PT Sans which really is an O with an underline, and that isn’t a problem. Even in the most exaggerated scenario: if Q was exactly the same as O, if you saw it in a non decorative context, it would still easily be interpreted as Q. Examine: “THE OUEEN LIVES IN BUCKINGHAM PALACE”.

As stated in the description, it was a rule for this font to have nothing below the baseline, so obviously I can’t accept your suggestion that the Q in KNIGHT would be good enough in this font.

@Peter (Petruuccio)

Those designs look really nice. I’m tempted.

@elliqvl

No, but you can create a full Cyrillic version if you want to!

I would definitely do that if I intended the font to be more playful. If that was the case, I’d have more diagonal cuts on other letters too. Maybe an idea for a future clone

@alfieisanidiot

You can clone it to your account and check for yourself. I activate Expert Mode, which enables the option to make Composite blocks. I use them to get the exact diagonal slopes I need that don’t align to the grid. I also open the Filters dialogue box from the menu, and set both block dimensions to 2, so blocks occupy a 2 by 2 grid space. That means you can make a 4 by 4 circle composed of the 4 rounded corner blocks.

The curves are the bottleneck in Fonstruct, because if you want a circle larger than 4 by 4, you have to make it out of diagonal segments like a decagon, and it doesn’t look as good as the proper curved blocks.

@LorDuFonts

No, I detest lowercase letters. I wish they didn’t exist.