Re: free keycaps font

[Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>]

Brooks Moses wrote:

> At 02:16 PM 9/12/2005, you wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 2005-09-12 at 23:08 +0200, Nikolai Weibull wrote:
>> > Very nice!  I would like them to lay closer to a standard baseline,
>> > though,
>>
>> I'm not sure what you mean by "lay closer to a standard baseline". The
>> baseline of the glyph inside the key is aligned with text outside the
>> key. I waffled back and forth trying to find the most attractive
>> position while building the font. The majority of keycaps fonts I looked
>> at chose the same baseline.
>
>
> Having looked at the uploaded .pdf, I agree: very nice!
>
> I do agree with Nikolai that there appears at first glance to be a bit 
> of a baseline problem.  As you mention, though, the baselines are 
> "right".  The actual difficulty, in my opinion, is that the font is 
> just a bit too small, and so the _tops_ of the keys are too low -- it 
> looks odd for them to be lower than the tops of the capital letters, 
> when the depth of the keys is so large.

Why not just center the characters? No problem for most of them since 
they have the same height (due to the upppercase char); All keyboards 
are different in positioning, so it does not hurt that much. By 
centering on gets a better look and feel.

Concerning the 'construct a key' approach, how about the following:

- provide shapes for a single, double-wide, tripple-wide, tripple 
height, enter-shape keys.
- next we can make a series of virtual fonts using the new condensed 
latin modern (sans or monospaced)

that way also keyboards for other languages can be constructed; I guess 
that a simple perl/ruby script can construct the virtual font.

Nice initiative

Hans

 

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