Hackweek Over

Aug 29 2008

I must say I’m happy about what I picked for this year’s Hackweek. My back and neck have not enjoyed the hackweek, but all the other body parts did :) While I am far from finished, I am surprised how much can be done on a font in a week (around 60 hours I would reckon) if I don’t need to worry about anything else.

The glyph coverage is better than what I planned. The typeface is stronger to what I sketched out and I hate there is no programmatic way to get smaller widths or alter x-height. Nevertheless I think the project was a success.

#

People keep asking what tools I use - Fontforge is the master tool for all this, it’s really packed with features. But I wouldn’t be able to draw a thing in it (even though it does have a large palette of tools), so all the glyphs have been constructed in Inkscape. Big thanks to George Williams not only for the amazing tool, but also for great documentation.

I’ve realized over the week just how much work needs to be done to create a full font family. I always considered the prices to be quite high, but this stuff is years of experience and endless tweaking. I know I’ll never try anything bigger than a display face/headliner in this life. That said, I think now is the perfect time to ask you to come forward and join the fun. Lots of international glyphs I have no idea about need to be done, the spacing fixed, etc. Check out the font from opensuse-art SVN and play with it, improve it. Discussions should take place on the opensuse-art mailing list. Thank you.

Also a big thanks to Novell for a great opportunity to Free opensuse and Linux in general one step further.