Haedus Book (font alpha test)

[Morrígan]

For the last two months or so, I've been working on a font to fill a gap in what is currently available by being well-designed and suitable for print while providing full support for Latin and phonetic symbol blocks (among others). One intention is to provide excellent support for glyph coverage, kerning, and mark-attachment especially where these are relevant for linguists, conlangers, paleographers, and classicists.

For example, SIL's charis has excessively thick serifs and does not look good for setting body-type. Linux Libertine looks good, but is missing a lot of characters and does not have great alignment for diacritical marks; it's glyph shapes are also complicated in a lot of places where they may not need be.

Haedus Book currently has some kerning problems but has pretty good coverage up through the main Cyrillic blocks and also Hebrew (including niqqud and cantillation marks).


I do plan on having italic and bold versions (and possibly using a multiple-master font for weight) and I may in the future also create a sans-serif version, including a monospace font.

Go ahead and grab the font here and the FontForge source as well if you'd like to check that out. I'm interested in feedback in terms of design and aesthetics, and especially any problems with metrics, kerning, mark positioning or anything like that. And most of all, I hope this will be useful to everyone.

[Jipí]

FWIW, here's a lipsum for a sample of flowing text.

Personally, I think that the top serifs look a little too strong. At least in the PDF it was that way, the effect is not as pronounced in the smoothened conversion to PNG above. Also, there's something up with the bow of the lower-case a. Lower-case g is interesting somehow. The line-spacing there is also quite generous, by the way – I only used single-line space.

NE: I used 12pt there (usual required text size for assignments, but books typically use something between 10 and 11pt), rendered by LibreOffice 3.6 on Ubuntu 12.04.

[Gulliver]

[Jipí]

Kerning is likely to be off in places since this is just an alpha release.

[Morrígan]

I'll have to check the height of Zero, but the numerals are definitely kind of terrible. And I thought I'd just fixed the hinting, but it looks like the serifs are getting fucked up again. It probably doesn't help that Haedus is currently a Type-1 font.

The way that the left-hand serifs on <n,m,r> and similar are weird.

[zompist]

The letterforms are all very nice. From Gulliver's sample, though, it seems that not all lower-case letters are the same height, which looks sloppy.

The Cyrillic ю seems too wide to me, and ф as well.

The hooks on ʂ ʐ seem way too prominent, especially compared with ɚ.

[Morrígan]

The letterforms are all very nice. From Gulliver's sample, though, it seems that not all lower-case letters are the same height, which looks sloppy.

Thanks; there seem to be problems with hinting, or more-so with the way programs are interpreting the hinting. I had problems with the minuscule forms, but I fixed that recently. The current version looks ok as rendered in Firefox, but LibreOffice seems to not interpret the hints correctly. I don't want to have to switch over to TrueType, but I've been considering it because of rampant compatibility problems with Type-1 hints.

[WeepingElf]

The typeface looks nice. But why is the lower-case 4 slanted? It looks utterly unmotivated.

[Morrígan]

Updated Alpha

And also a PDF showing all the glyphs

The weird oldstyle 4 was a leftover that I never updated, but I fixed it, along with a lot of other things. I also was unhappy with the minuscule g, so I fixed it. I think I also fixed a LOT of the hinting problems, and tweaked the kerning a bit in a few places. I'm using Haedus Book in Firefox, and so far, it's looking pretty good, except for the period, which seems to sit too low. I should probably create a test document in HTML for this...

[Xephyr]

Something weird happens when I try to type a dash in the middle of a line of text-- the line overlaps with the text both to the left and to the right of it; this doesn't happen when I type a dash in fresh text.

I fully support this endeavor, though the line weight to character size ratio is a bit small for me-- I have to squint my eyes or turn the word processor magnification up to 130% or so to read it comfortably, but I suppose that's just me.* I agree with gp, though, that the row width should be narrower. As it is, normal text looks 1.5-spaced.

* - My personal dream is still for somebody to make a fully character-loaded version of Palatino Linotype.

[Jipí]

Palatino Linotype.

I guess one could do that if the license for URW Palladio L permits it – it comes with Ghostscript and Linux distros, but idk if it's under a copyleft license that would allow third parties to extend it. Hermann Zapf, the original designer, has also worked on extending Palatino in recent years, so you might get a version with more glyphs and stuff from Linotype. But that'll cost a shitload of money very likely (unless you can ~obtain~ it from ~alternative sources~).

[Buran]

I don't really like the way the top of the lowercase t looks. The way that it dips slightly makes it look as if there's a notch; combined with the way it slants (something which I don't like, maybe it's my hatred of Arial influencing me) it looks very strange, especially at medium sizes.

[Morrígan]

So, apparently there is a problem mark-to-mark positioning, where diacritics will not stack correctly and I have no idea why. It tests ok in FontForge, but they just don't render correctly. I'm gonna have to look into this a bit more while I try to refine the kerning.

I don't really like the way the top of the lowercase t looks. The way that it dips slightly makes it look as if there's a notch; combined with the way it slants (something which I don't like, maybe it's my hatred of Arial influencing me) it looks very strange, especially at medium sizes.

Huh? Yeah, this top is rounded, but I have no idea what you are talking about with the bottom - except where the shape is the same as in almost every single roman typeface ever.

[Io]

«d» and «r» are weird, I don't like how the d's vertical line doesn't go all the way down; я's whip is too thin compared to the rest.


By the way, can somebody tell me why Georgian in standard web page size looks not as black on screen as other alphabets and it's somehow way too anti-aliased? Is it really more anti-aliased?! This has been bothering me for a while.

(unless you can ~obtain~ it from ~alternative sources~).

I've tried at the more obvious of such sources, however I couldn't find dharma gothic expanded regular.

[Morrígan]

«d» and «r» are weird, I don't like how the d's vertical line doesn't go all the way down; я's whip is too thin compared to the rest.

What's weird about <r>, the terminal? And I'm not sure what might be happening with <d>, the stem absolutely does reach the baseline. What are you rendering these in btw? Some applications I've tested simply fail to interpret Type-1 hints correctly

And for what it's worth (nothing) I kind of hate Palatino.

[Ser]

«d» and «r» are weird, I don't like how the d's vertical line doesn't go all the way down; я's whip is too thin compared to the rest.

What's weird about <r>, the terminal? And I'm not sure what might be happening with <d>, the stem absolutely does reach the baseline. What are you rendering these in btw? Some applications I've tested simply fail to interpret Type-1 hints correctly

And for what it's worth (nothing) I kind of hate Palatino.

I see what he means, he means to say that the whip of <я> is a lot thinner than the other lines of that letter, particularly obvious in pt. 11 and 12 more than pt. 14, so that your brain kind of wants to omit those pixels and see it as a turned <P>. If you look at TNR, Palatino and Garamond, the whip of pt. 11/12 <я> is as thick as the ascender and the turn of the bow (in Palatino it gets even thicker than those two by the end of line).

I don't see how <d>'s ascender doesn't reach the base line, however.

Other than that, I'll just add the hinting really doesn't seem to work for me.

[Morrígan]

«d» and «r» are weird, I don't like how the d's vertical line doesn't go all the way down; я's whip is too thin compared to the rest.

What's weird about <r>, the terminal? And I'm not sure what might be happening with <d>, the stem absolutely does reach the baseline. What are you rendering these in btw? Some applications I've tested simply fail to interpret Type-1 hints correctly

And for what it's worth (nothing) I kind of hate Palatino.

I see what he means, he means to say that the whip of <я> is a lot thinner than the other lines of that letter, particularly obvious in pt. 11 and 12 more than pt. 14, so that your brain kind of wants to omit those pixels and see it as a turned <P>. If you look at TNR, Palatino and Garamond, the whip of pt. 11/12 <я> is as thick as the ascender and the turn of the bow (in Palatino it gets even thicker than those two by the end of line).

I don't see how <d>'s ascender doesn't reach the base line, however.

Other than that, I'll just add the hinting really doesn't seem to work for me.

I know <я> has problems, he was talking about <r>. But could you post some images of the hinting problems? I fixed some things, but this might be one of the biggest development issues.

[Ser]

I know <я> has problems, he was talking about <r>.

Oh, <r>. Yeah, that's likely to be just the hinting.

But could you post some images of the hinting problems? I fixed some things, but this might be one of the biggest development issues.

You just need to look at the left upper corner of <r> and <m> and I think that says it all. For comparison: TNR (above Haedus), Palatino, Garamond, Linux Libertine.

haedushinting.png

[Hallow XIII]

Holy [EXPLETIVE REDACTED]. A linguistically valuable font that isn't ugly? Where have you been all my life?

Also, is that an inverted æ?

[dhok]

Ezh looks a little...off.

(So do the alveolar approximant, palatal lateral and whatever the hell you call that rounded mid central vowel that looks like a butt with the cheeks pointing left).

I really like this font, though, let me just say.

[Qwynegold]

For example, SIL's charis has excessively thick serifs and does not look good for setting body-type.

I hate that Charis SIL is so small. It's a bitch to use in Character Map.

What is that letter between Þ and Æ?

[Hallow XIII]

That's probably a Wynn without connector.

[Pinetree]

Apparently it's called a Vend. It's U+A768.

[Qwynegold]

Apparently it's called a Vend. It's U+A768.

Oh huh, thanks. I don't seem to have a font with U+A768-A779.

[Pole, the]

There seems to be some unwanted overlap in ą.
Also the ogonek seems to be too much to the left. See also here.

Edit: Another bug makes the font listed as sans.