@Xeno: :^)

The extended character set is always easier to achieve when advanced scaling uses integer values than when fractional values are used. Fractional scaling schemes also populate fontstructions with tiny flaws in the form of gaps and notches, even where they are cleverly hidden in the best case.

So thank you, Mr. Meek, for the holiday gift. Even small doors can open to big worlds of new possibility!

Lots of smiles to share. Thanks guys!

@Em42: Nice catch! Really, i needed to go back and review all the instances of bracketing because my initial publishing had a rather scattershot execution of that beloved but bungled detail!

A very large part of the huge download count came from troubleshooting some software glitches at the very end of my fontstructing process. I was tracking down these invisible bricks that caused unpredictable output from the fontmortar, but could rarely be viewed or otherwise accessed in the fontstructor. I tried all kinds of reconstruction techniques, and once that was all sorted out I failed to regain my focus on several of these minuscule but very important details of the serif design as well as a couple other bricks that straight up vanished or were otherwise omitted.

So thanks for offering your careful attention and encouraging me to revisit them. My mistake shows me the importance of a more thorough review of each glyph before publishing (with and without outlines turned on).

Continuing with intaglio’s culinary allusion, it pleases me to no end that a true iron chef such as yourself of this “vanilla” school of fontstructing takes such interest and appreciates the beauty of my achievement in these design schemata. I think cloning at this time will reveal a more consistent execution throughout the fontstruction, thanks in large part to you. : )

@intaglio: Thanks, my friend! I wouldn’t exactly call my fontstructing endeavors “vanilla”, but I like the nomenclature and analysis you offer! It was for the possibilities opened up for all the different approaches you name (and the blurred line between them) that i diligently kept pursuing the once only dreamed boolean AND feature to the radical if impatient eventual solution of isolating the brickstacking glitch, and I think this salad-day memory most fittingly captures what I have intended in my work here.

So much of your recent works from zingaling on are also favorites of mine. You keep on whipping up these tasty tiny grid treats! I respect your tireless pursuit of a unique and charming interpretation of brush- and pen-like ductus using grids of all sizes. You’ve taken this further than anyone here!

Fs Kronos has an s five grid spaces tall and achieves that with 2:2 filtering (so is 2.5 bricks tall). Geodoni Extra Black Condensed also uses 2:2 filtering and has an x-height of six grid spaces (three bricks tall). Do you want to create an s that is 5 bricks tall in the sense that, with 2:2 filters turned on, it would occupy 10 vertical grid spaces?

@naveenchandru: Thanks for inspiring a lively dialog and enjoying all my work! ;)

@thalamic: Haha, I like how you write my name. So much better than the will.i.30s going around ; ) Thanks for understanding and appreciating why I make my fontstructions cloneable. It is not so much for inspiring derivative works, though they can be awesome too, but for empowering other fontstructors with my unknown techniques. I don’t do a good job of documenting and translating, so I guess speaking fluent fs-ese is the price of admission.

@elmoyenique: :D you make me want to get up and dance!

@aphoria: Hmm, I do have a habit of hiding my most radical ideas in plain sight. But I am not sure I totally follow you. What exactly do you mean, if you don’t mind me asking? Thanks for the love!

I edited the comment live to fix the formatting errors soon after publishing my comment, but you must have loaded it somehow before I did that! Thanks for helping me out again in this way!

P.S. OMG, I just realized you meant the unclosed bold tag in the DESCRIPTION. When I am logged in, the html doesn’t actually load in the description, so I never noticed my mistake. ¡

Wow, good eagle eyes, guys! I doubted anyone would notice before I could nail things down, so I left my modifications in a transitional state, such as neurone suggests. The motivating factor was beginning to add some Cyrillic capitals – I can’t fudge И like I can N.

Still, I largely agree. That capital form of N (from И) failed to mesh well, especially with the legacy lowercasey M. I tried a few capital forms of N and M upon first building the font, and, if I remember correctly, the lack of stackable composites at the time ensured it to be a fools errand.

So I felt like I was taking the easy way out for M/N, no matter how well it fits the style. I still believe there are more polished solutions possible – likely they involve reversing, or at least balancing, the extreme stroke contrast that BZ points out.

Stay tuned, and keep those eyes peeled! 8 )

It’s true that these angular forms with their rugged chopped vertices and dramatic ink traps do not fully jibe with the more rounded scheme established by the other latin capitals. But, as I explained above, I am working out Cyrillics and think I need the angular forms there. It is more convenient, if backward, for me to test out characters like “И” and “М” by testing out their latin relatives. I keep the originals as alternates until I am ready to swap them back in. So, under fontstruction... =)

I liked your boxing analogy enough to make the humorous sample to point out, yes indeed angular “M” is a scrappy contender. But what a contender! ;)

Hey DJ Nippa!

Thanks for all the creative input, my friend. I have been away from my computer, celebrating my mom’s birthday, so it’s taken me a minute to see these images. They are awesome.

Especially, the last round (my favorite is the very last M), you show how a few subtle tweaks to the fontmortar’s output can make all the difference between a successful glyph, in the scheme of things, and a close-but-no-cigar failure. Your trapping refinements demonstrate the visual balance I wanted but could not attain; greater still is the harmony achieved by a slightly wider M. Hmm, maybe I can get pretty close to that character width with the composites on hand. I think I tried that approach and ruled it out for some reason or another. You show it is the correct approach.

I agree with you assessment of the Y. It was one of the revisions I imagined myself getting around to at some point.

Testing the limits of the strictly brick-based system is interesting enough. But you teach me again that the deal is taking these modular fontstructions and deriving real fonts by making necessary optical corrections (and adding vastly needed kerning pairs and letter-width adjustments). Thanks again for encouraging me.

Now I just need to fix the X11 install on my system and get FontLab up and running! :)

Correction: I read that wrong. Yes, I should get FontLab Studio...I was talking about FontForge. Free and open source are nice (for a somewhat stingy, broke bloke like myself) but I guess my difficulties even getting the damn thing running show that I get what I pay for!

>> ...with some financial reward to pay for your hobby...

You are not alone in offering me this advice. My girlfriend says the same thing. :-)

Though she uses the word “obsession” in place of “hobby.” ;-)

Seriously, thanks for recognizing my talents and encouraging me to properly realize them.