Re: Question about customizing emmentaler font

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 6:02 PM, tisimst <address@hidden> wrote:
> Jan Nieuwenhuizen wrote
>> ... It seems that you're spot-on with respect to the eight rest
>> inner corner!  However, it seems to me that the added roundings in the
>> G-clef are overdone?
>
> Indeed, the amount of roundness is debatable. What's funny about this is
> that I didn't actually create the rounds based on what I saw in any scan. I
> simply thought about what's logically possible when metalworking by hand,
> and, in the FontForge examples above (of the treble clef and the eighth
> rest), I designed it to have an real (printed) radius of approximately 0.005
> inches at 20pt size. This is pretty small in real life, especially if you
> are doing things by hand, but possible for a skilled craftsman and engraver.

Thanks for bringing this up! You are completely right; we never
considered the inside corners, and did the outside corners on the
assumption that they are fragile and would become rounded through the
violence of punching. Werner is right that you'd have to do a global
postprocessing pass to really do all all the line intersections, but
rounding inside corners in the font is a reasonable first
approximation.

As for the missing characters: my recollection is faded, but I think
we do some special fiddling to select emmentaler for the alphabetic
chars. Is your tweaked font also called emmentaler?






> I'm sure you knew this already, but it can look overdone when some rounds
> visually stand out more than others because of the angle of the two lines
> that are being smoothing out. The more acute the angle, the more whitespace
> gets filled in, so it can look imbalanced if the angle must be
> non-perpendicular, but by increasing the round on the opposite, obtuse side
> it can be made to look more consistent. This is why, I think, it is more
> common to see, for example, the downward swoosh of the treble clef to pass
> through the lower curl at more of a perpendicular angle so that these rounds
> are more uniform at all the intersections, like in my example above.
>
>
> Jan Nieuwenhuizen wrote
>> ...  We took quite some care to add roundings, apparently we
>> missed some.  It is debatable whether the roundings on the G-clef should
>> be added to the font, though.
>
> I believe you did and I am NOT saying that Emmentaler is a bad font or that
> it has to be changed. Please understand that I am not attacking your work. I
> may be the only one who likes this, and that is really okay with me. Whether
> or not this kind of thing /needs/ to be a feature of the Emmentaler font
> wasn't the intent of my original line of questions, but I would certainly
> vote for it, if it wasn't too challenging to implement in Metafont. Either
> way, I'd like to create and use a font that has this feature. That's all. I
> didn't intend to push to have this be a feature of the default font. It
> would become part of my own "house style", if you will.
>
> I have shown it to others musicians at my school and they seem to really
> like it (they REALLY love the output of LilyPond compared to the usual
> Finale and Sibelius, but that's getting off topic). Anyways, thank you for
> your comments and thoughts. I appreciate all you guys do to make this a
> superb piece of software! Any thoughts as to why some of the glyphs /don't
> appear at all/, would be very much appreciated.
>
> Regards,
> Abraham
>
>
>
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-- 
Han-Wen Nienhuys - address@hidden - http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen