Category Archives: Scripts

Articles on writing systems.

Digitale Typografie für fiktionale Schriftsysteme – ein Rant

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  • Dies ist die Übersetzung eines englischsprachigen Beitrags (click for English version), den ich bereits im August 2011 geschrieben habe. Da scheinbar ein größeres Interesse an diesem Beitrag bestand, dachte ich, es wäre eventuell sinnvoll, ihn auch ins Deutsche zu übersetzen.
  • Mittlerweile habe ich auch einen Font mithilfe von Graphite gebastelt.
  • Beachte, dass ich nicht einmal ein halbprofessioneller Schriftdesigner bin. Alles, was du hier liest, ist learning by doing und daher sehr subjektiv. Ich habe mir bisher nicht mehr über Schriftdesign beigebracht, als nötig ist, um meine eigene Schrift umzusetzen.

Eines meiner fortlaufenden, mit dem Sprachenbasteln verbundenen Projekte ist es, das Schriftsystem meiner Kunstsprache auf den Computer zu bringen. Ich versuche seit mehreren Jahren, brauchbare Lösungen zu finden, bin aber immer früher oder später gegen eine Wand gerannt.
Continue reading Digitale Typografie für fiktionale Schriftsysteme – ein Rant →

Digital Typography for Fictional Writing Systems – A Rant

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This article still gets accessed a lot even after over 5 10 years since publishing it. Technology, however, continuously advances, so please be aware that the information below may be outdated.

  • Dieser Beitrag ist jetzt auch auf Deutsch zu lesen, nämlich hier.
  • By now, I’ve made a font that uses Graphite.
  • Keep in mind that I’m not even a semi-professional font designer. All you read here is my subjective experience in learning by doing. I haven’t yet explored font-making beyond what I needed for my own stuff.

One of my ongoing language-construction related pet projects is to bring my constructed language’s writing system to the computer. I have been trying to come up with workable solutions to do this for a number of years, but always hit brick walls sooner or later. Continue reading Digital Typography for Fictional Writing Systems – A Rant →

Tahano Hinyan and Daléian alphabet

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Tahano Hikamu “Java” Hinyan[1. The italic variant of my Tahano Hikamu font, Tagāti Book, is modelled after this style. — 2012-11-09]

For some time now I’ve played around with a style for Ayeri’s native writing system Tahano Hikamu that I loosely based on the look of the Javanese script (which I’ve already mentioned in a previous posting). I made several examples before using an experimental font, but the style has not been documented anywhere so far. However, the file is up now as a kind of brochure/leaflet/thing intended to be a supplement to the “Alphabet” page. That is, I spared me the work to repeat myself with explanations, so most of the file’s content is really just a table of the different characters with their names underneath.

Download (PDF, 1.1 MB)

For those who are curious: The outlines of the characters were drawn in Illustrator, the brochure was made in InDesign, the stock photos are from the wonderful stock.xchng. This all also explains the file size, by the way.

Daléian Alphabet

Daléian script example

Note that I’ve also put up information for the Daléian script again. I just printed out the relevant page from my old website as a PDF file. The low resolution of the images is suboptimal for this purpose, but I suppose it’s still good enough to read on screen and get an idea.

Download (PDF, 143 KB)

Tahano (Nu)Veno(n) font

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Tahano (Nu)veno(n)Just in case this was missed by anyone … If you’ve been following my work you may remember I used to have this Vine Script thing, which was an ornamental alphabet that took inspiration for its characters from climbing plants. Rebecca Bettencourt, fellow Conlang-L reader, made a font of it last year. We agreed that it would be freeware and that I could offer it for download. I’ve not done so up to now.

I earlier deleted information on the script here as I didn’t see it directly related to Ayeri anymore, but I still used to receive requests about it occasionally. Since the alphabet itself is kind of pretty – although I’ve only ever seen it as a minor experiment and never used it actively to write longer passages in Ayeri with because it is simply too unwieldy for that purpose – I didn’t want it to get lost completely. Essentially, you may want to think of it as the equivalent of an EP in music.

The font is self-transcribing, basically. There’s also a page on the script as it was digitalized on Omniglot, you may want to check that for documentation, as well as the Readme file included in the ZIP archive.

Download (MD5: e9228a56fefadccce3c1abda8bc4456e; 59,355 bytes)

  • The description of Tahano Veno from the old Benung page can be downloaded as a PDF as well. It doesn’t significantly differ from the description at Omniglot, though.