HOW TO MAKE BOUSTROPHEDON FONTS FOR FREE

[hieroglyphs]

HOW TO MAKE BOUSTROPHEDON FONTS FOR FREE


ABSTRACT

Using a free downloadable font-making software, you can create fonts that replace upper-case Roman Letters ( for left to right text ) and Hebrew letters (also in the Unicode field) ( for right to left text ) WITH your signs of choice. If you open a Word document, pull up that font, and then change your “imput language” to Hebrew, you can write left to right with the CAPS on and right to left with the CAPS off. To switch typing direction, you turn CAPS on and off.

INTRO

bou-strophe-don “ox-turn-ing”

I just figured this out a few days ago and never found it online ! I've been looking for 10 years now. No one's probably figured it out yet because 1 it's an obscure desire and 2 the scholars who need a program or way of doing this can get some computer programmer to make a program for them.

I've wanted this since 2001, when I saw Atlantis : The Lost Empire, a Disney movie featuring a conlang by Klingon's Marc Okrand and a conscript by Disney art guys plus him. Atlantean in the movie is written boustrophedon. Disney had a website at the time that advised typists to type each letter then use the arrow keys to go backwards and add another until the backwards line was complete, then have the whole thing aligned center.

There was and still is some computing program free online (not downloadable) that would reverse text (letters and all) but I don't know if it was copyable and I can't find it easily right now. And then in general, there is some free program online that claims to write boustrophedon and rongo rongo boustrophedon. I don't remember about that so much, but I think I tried to download it and failed and even then I'm not sure if it did what I wanted it to.

And then a couple days ago, it occured to me how it might be done. I had been messing around with fonts and computers for a few years now.

HOW TO USE SUCH A FONT

(Now I have a PC with Window's Vista on it.)

Download the fonts.

http://www.filehosting.org/file/details ... igbou3.ttf

(This one doesn’t change the glyphs, like in the movie.)

http://www.filehosting.org/file/details ... uflip1.ttf

( This one changes the direction of the glyphs based on which direction the text faces, like Atlantean would if it was a real ancient writing system.)

Install the fonts.
(Start > Control Panel > Fonts . Move the font you want in there.)

Add "Hebrew" to your computer's languages.
( Start > Control Panel > Regional and Language Options > Formats > Current Format > Hebrew )

Turn on the Hebrew keyboard.
( Start > Control Panel > Regional and Language Options > Keyboards and Languages > Change Keyboards > Add ... etc, click on stuff to find boxes to check etc. )

Pull up a Word document, switch to the font you want, then switch your computer's language to Hebrew ( Left Alt + Shift works well ).

If you want left to right typing, don't use CAPSLOCK.
If you want right to left typing, use CAPSLOCK.

To switch back to English, do Left Alt + Shift.

I recommend chaning line alignment to make your text look intriging – if Arabic starts at the right, what sort of writing begins at one end and continues at another ?

HOW TO MAKE SUCH A FONT

1

Find and download FontForge, a free downloadable font-making software.

This link is the easiest way :

http://www.geocities.jp/meir000/fontforge/

( Yes, Geocities lives in Japan. Scroll down to the link and download it. I had it saved to my desktop. You might have to visit the FontForge website and read a ton, and search around online for directions (otherwise), because it’s a totally complicated thing to set up on your computer without that thing by the Japanese dude. )

FontForge has a message board where you can find people to field your techy-type questions, should you run into problemos.

2

Find the manual on the website, download it, and take the time to learn how to use the software. You have to find the .bat file, start it up, hit ENTER and wait a while, then maybe do that a couple times. If at some point you do something stupid like copy something from outside the program into the program, it might completely stop working and auto-save and or lose all your work. It’s buggy, but it only hits a snag on occaision.

3

Arabic (unicode field / Microsoft keyboard format ) only does left to right but Hebrew does lowercase Hebrew left to right and uppercase Roman right to left (at least on my computer). So whatever you want boustrophedon, it has to fit into the keys covered by the Hebrew keyboard format.

Using FontForge, you can flip glyphs upside-down and so have Rongo-Rongo (though I have examined it very carefully and don’t think Rongo Rongo is true writing, but mneumonic scribble like Micmac Hieroglyphs (which I deciphered, unpublished, gonna be online somewhere, maybe Scribd).

Making a single font usually takes me about 4 or 8 hours total, and that’s just copying glyphs from other fonts. If you make images and import them into each glyph, it takes a bit longer. It’s addictive but worth it. One of the first ones I made was for Old Persian, the next for Classical Chinese. It really rockets your learning of a script to be able to hit that key and have the right glyph pop out (though studying sign etymology and related writing systems helps more).

4

See above directions for how to use the font. I hope you can follow them.

Here’s some search strings that I entered into Start > Help and Support that helped me :

change the display language
change imput language
change your keyboard layout

*Changing the display language can also help teach you days of the week in a large variety of world languages !


CONCLUSION

Okay, I hope someone finds this interesting or useful.

UPDATE ABOUT ME AND MY RESEARCH

To leave an update about my research, I continue to do work on a bunch of languages, but have yet to gather, edit, and zip all the files into collections for uploading. I have a bunch of stuff on Scribd under scrollroll http://www.scribd.com/scrollroll but it’s pretty disorganized as-yet, sorry.

My biggest project is putting online pictures I took of all the inscriptions of Angkor in Cambodia ( Fall-Spring 2010 ), together with transliterations, French, and new English translations by me. ( Old Khmer and Sanskrit in Old Khmer Script, an Old Dravidian Brahmi script ) Aside from that, I mostly find stuff online and make interlinear translations of stuff that can be sorted into dictionaries using Excel. I put some stuff on a Photo Bucket page and some on my Scribd so far, but really not much. ( http://s1229.beta.photobucket.com/user/ ... 7/profile/ ) I do all languages, past and present, mostly past. Oh, even more important than the Angkor project is my hieroglyphic dictionary. I’m making a single signlist of all hieroglyphic writing systems ( I specialize in them ), mostly organized according to Gardiner’s Signlist for Egyptian. It’s also going to be free online somewhere. I think I might put up a preliminary version here tonight. I also made a polyglot dictionary combining all easily accessible word lists online with my own interlinear translations of ancient languages. It’s a lot of fun but very big.

I don't have internet at home ( like most people on the blue planet ), so I probably won't see responses for a couple months. This also makes uploading stuff more difficult. I came online now because I got excited about that boustrophedon font thing.

[Gray Richardson]

That's actually a very cool solution! Seems simple to use, and not too hard to create. I have Font Forge; I may try this some day. I've never really had the urge to create a boustrophedon font, but it's a handy tip to have in my toolbag for future reference—just in case. In fact, now that I know how to do it, it might just inspire me to think of a reason to.

Thanks for sharing this!

[Qwynegold]

Does just using the right-to-left mark (U+200F) not work?