Mac Mania 2/MacMania 2.toast/Demo's/Fonts/GoodCityModern TT⁄T1/About GoodCityModern

Text File | 1991-09-26 | 4KB | 79 lines

Welcome to GoodCityModern,

Naturally, you may be asking yourself, ‘How did he create
this font?’ It started late one night, restless... Glancing
through some type books, I stopped upon a reproduction of
the Gutenberg typeface; thought, that would be a great
typeface to do in Fontographer. Thinking further, perhaps
several weeks in the library and several more at my Mac with
Fontographer 3.0 and I would be done. Humm, things do not
happen quite that way. Murphy’s-law was determined to be
bothersome. There were only fragments of pages to go by...
My Mac and scanner broke, requiring costly repairs. However,
while visiting my parents, (near C.W. Post Campus of Long
Island University in Brookville, New York), I found a full
character set to copy at the college library. Work could
commence.

The reproduction was small and the copier worse, but I
managed. Studying the page, I quickly realized several key
points. One, Gutenberg designed the font with a deep
understanding of Latin grammar and spelling. He had kerning
pairs based on repeated letter usage throughout the Bible
and kerned small words into tight units (i.e., “our”, “of”,
and “and”). Second, that he posited key geometric guidelines
to aid in creating the font. He was doing more than just
capturing the scribe-like strokes of his day, but in
addition had a respect for the metal and ink to be used in
printing his Bible. This second point made it possible to
actually create the font; because of the smallness of the
reproduced letters, I had to re-create (for techies,
‘reverse-engineer’) them. (My loupe and the page became very
close friends!)

After some hand drawings to ‘feel’ the letter forms, I
scanned the page at 150 dpi and made a bitmap font using
Fontastic Plus™. Sometimes, I felt another hand on my mouse
while fat-bitting away late at night... Then, I typed Latin
text into Fontastic Plus’ sample text edit window to see the
typeface in actual context. Next, using the bitmap font, a
PostScript printer, and Apple’s print driver, I printed a
page of characters at 200% enlargement with the option
‘smoothing’ (to partly smoothed out the jaggies) checked
from Appple’s print driver. Thus, one could scale and smooth
out a bitmap font—without fatbitting a lot. Finally, I
cleaned up the scan in MacPaint®.

I did preliminary versions in Fontographer 3.0.5 thru 3.1.
As the in-house tester for FreeHand 3.0, I was naturally
thinking mostly in terms of FreeHand, constantly
experimenting with new ways to use it. At one point, I
wondered “how much could I do my font in FreeHand?” So, I
placed the scanned image into FreeHand 3.0 to trace and
refine—using all its new features to accomplish the task.
For example, while Fontographer has layers, I preferred the
naming and ordering the layers palette that FreeHand
offered. Yes, bcp by bcp, the font came alive. There were
days I felt a presence in the room...

Once the character paths were done, I simply option-copied
them from FreeHand into Fontographer 3.2. Once paths are in
Fontographer, one can create the needed ligatures. Finally,
after upgrading from Fontographer 3.2 to 3.3, I created
kerning pairs. Based on the same careful study Gutenberg did
on Latin letters, I needed to create 800 pairs! Now as of
5:15 pm, June 18, 1991, using Fontographer 3.3, I was
finished.

A few historical notes. The original typeface was created
for Latin, not for modern English; hence, the ‘modern’ in
the name of my translation. I had to create a full Roman set
everyone can use. However, there is an exact Latin version
which is not done. The ‘goodcity’ part of its name comes
from German: guten-good, burg-city, (actually, Earl Allen, a
fellow Altsysian coined the term — thanks, Earl!)

Enjoy and use in good health.

Andrew S. Meit Software Tester (and Stackhead) Altsys
Corporation