[Intro]
Imagine communicating with people. If you don't take into account normal talking, then text messages come to mind.
Every text you type is, first of all, letters, numbers, and for some, even hieroglyphs.
But what do they have in common above all else?
Of course, coconut, laundry detergent, apricots and a powerful pump (this is a joke of course)
Okay. Now let's get serious. Putting any jokes aside, it's the writing that brings it all together.
Whether in real life or on a computer, letters are rendered to one degree or another according to some rules that are set either by us or by the GUI in the computer itself.
And if we talk about simple writing, it's called "handwriting".
With the advent of the industrial revolution, writing also changed.
The first typewriters appeared, giving the written text one shape, one arrangement, making the writing fully readable to every eye, and so on.
In time it was called "font," and over time it was adopted in ordinary writing as well.
For example...
When a person with beautiful handwriting was asked to write something very neatly on some poster, or to sign a book, they would say: - "Please write in beautiful font".
The term has retained its meaning to this day, including on our computers.
Simply said, a "font" is a graphical superstructure for displaying text in one form or another.
Despite the same concept, it can be implemented differently in different OSes of different generations, which brings us to the topic of our video today.
Today we are going to create our own font and check how it looks and how it differs on Windows and Linux. I am sure it will be very interesting!
"I made my font. How do fonts work?" P.S: Your opinion may not coincide with that of the author. Thank you.
So, let's start with the most simple one.
What is a font?
A little earlier I mentioned that a font is a graphical superstructure for displaying text. But that's not quite the right description.
A font is a set of characters, usually letters, numbers, punctuation, and other symbols. Fonts may be larger than others, or they may be bolder or italicized than others.
Fonts have different font sizes (kegles), and typefaces.
Font size (Deutsch: Kegel) is measured in points (or "pt").
In all systems, the minimum font size (or kegel) is 8 points.
In Windows, in many programs you can only find a maximum font size of 72 points, but some programs allow you to set a larger font size - for example, the program Paint.Net allows you to set as much as 288 points.
The font family, which has a name like "typeface", is a collection of all fonts that have the same similar characteristics in design.
Fonts belonging to the same family may differ in type size and font style, but have the same basic design.
Take the Raleway font as an example.
Raleway contains many fonts of its own inside - this is what is called a family.
But Raleway Bold, Raleway Italic are the font typefaces.
Let those fonts differ from each other, but they all have the same design, which makes them similar.
And if we take one thing, for example Raleway Bold, it's already a font.
But wait, I think I must have confused you...
By font, we mean that it is a graphical drawing of the font style of letters, signs and symbols, and so on.
But in computer terms, a font is a file that includes all the characters and other signs within one typeface
Fonts are most often distributed in TTF and OTF formats.
"TTF" is an acronym for TrueType fonts, a font format created by Apple and licensed to Microsoft for free use in the 1980s.
And because Microsoft licenses the format, it is now the most widely used format on Windows computers.
"OTF" comes from OpenType, and it is a font format based on TTF.
OpenType is also a subsidiary of Microsoft, but this time the technology was implemented with Adobe instead of Apple.
OpenType fonts are used not only on computers and documents, but also on the Internet.
Where are the fonts stored on the system?
In Windows, all fonts are stored in the Fonts folder, which is in the Windows folder on the C: drive,...
...but in Linux there is no common font folder as such: the fonts that will be available to all users are in /usr/share/fonts.
The fonts that will only be available to a certain user are in a folder called ".fonts", which is in the home directory.
Each operating system displays this font differently, and while the same font may look the same on Linux as it does on Windows, it may not be the same "under the hood".
Let's take some test font.
[sounds of opening photoshop and creating conditions for demonstration]
As you can see, the font is displayed smoothly, beautifully, and not some kind of pixelated font.
You will notice at the top a special menu for choosing how to display this font, and the "Windows LCD" option will display the font the way Windows usually draws it in other applications. [in Paint, for example].
Linux obviously does not have such a feature and the rendering of the fonts themselves is primarily done by the display.
The most typical example is the Xorg display
The kernel and the base system do not draw the fonts you see on the desktop or in programs in any way.
You may be asking... - Then why does TTY have its own font?
The answer is very simple: it is a set of packed glyphs that are simply used by the framebuffer to display text on the screen.
To completeness we can draw a parallel with the children's cubes.
Imagine that a set of glyphs is a bag of cubes with different letters drawn on them.
To put a word together, what will you do?
Of course!
Of course! Take the cubes with the right letters and make a word out of them. The same practice is observed here.
The systems have a character table in which some letter or character is listed under some serial number.
The character table on Windows by default shows all the characters in the font in Unicode format. But if someone would like to see characters that are in a different format, for example in DOS encoding format of any language, it is no problem to select it in the list below.
And now, from theory, we move on to the most interesting part: drawing our own font.
Before we start drawing fonts, we need a graphics tablet and font program.
The most popular programs for creating fonts are FontLab and FontForge, but personally I want to draw in the program FontCreator, because for me personally this program is comfortable and easy to use. [!not an ad!]
Launch the program, and there is nothing in front of us but a large toolbar at the top.
Click "Create" and a window appears in which we need to specify the name of our future font and its format.
After we have specified everything, three windows appear in front of us: the window in the lower left corner shows an example of the font drawn by the name of the publisher of this program: High-Logic.
See, every time we enter a letter, for example we just write the letter D, the output is like this: /D.
Slashes are discarded and we see just D. If no cell exists in the table, which could be the letter D, then the cell ".notdef" is shown, or the usual square, which shows that the specified character you entered, simply does not exist.
And the biggest window is the one showing the font table, and on the left side it's sorted by folders and other values.
By default, there will be no Cyrillic letters in the program - no, it is not because of any sanctions, but because the program itself is in English and actually it used the blanks of English letters only.
But you can add Cyrillic manually.
I will not draw the font with the mouse, but, as I said before, with a graphic tablet - manually, each letter and symbol, by myself.
Since everyone is ready, let's start to draw.
[upbeat motivational music for speedrun]
After we drew everything, it's time to compile our font and check how it looks on Windows and Linux.
But before we make it a system one, we can open it and a font viewer window will open in front of us showing all the letters, numbers and standard symbols.
There is also a test phrase here that is spelled in various sizes.
The Russian version is "Eat some more of those soft French buns and have some tea," while the English version is "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog".
But why these phrases? It's simple: they are pangram phrases.
These phrases use all the letters of the alphabet, and if possible, each letter of the alphabet is used only once.
There are many such phrases and they are different for each language.
So, we've eaten the "french buns" and now it's time to look at what the font looks like on Windows and Linux.
As a demonstration, I will take Windows 10 and use the Winaero Tweaker to simply change the default font from Segoe UI to a font created by me, [my own, personal, limited, awesome, privatized like a work of art :D]
[final result of my work]
Um... I couldn't have expected a better result. But, we do everything for fun :D
So, putting all these jokes aside, what do we have?
First of all, the font was small, I thought it would be somehow larger in size.
Secondly, as you can see, the design language of the system is honed to use the Segoe UI family, and some changes to this "language", as one would say, "destroy" the entire aesthetics of the interface.
UWP-applications show all the same font Segoe UI, either you need to change in the registry separately, or this font is just "nailed on tightly". [or maybe you just need to change the ttf's]
But that doesn't matter, because as I said earlier, we're just testing the whole thing just for fun.
n Linux, changing the font is much easier, just like 2x2. I am using Debian 11 with KDE Plasma 5 and I can change the system font without problems in settings.
And on KDE the font looks like this. At least when compared to Windows, in KDE the selected font is applied everywhere throughout the system except the login screen.
And at the very least, you can adjust the font size here as well. All in all, not bad.
But I'm not me if I don't go knee-deep in a swamp of fonts.
Remember when I mentioned the font mechanism in TTY on Linux? Well, since this video is about fonts, let's move away from "graphics" and take the plank higher.
We have the TTY console of Fedora in front of us. What I'm going to do is put, apply, and test some font in action.
First, we will install a special package. In our case, this is "terminus-fonts-console", but the name of the package may be different depending on your Linux distro.
So the fonts are already installed, and how do we view them?
Very easy. They are located in the directory "consolefonts", which, respectively, is in the folder of user assemblies and libraries (that is, the directory "/usr")
You can see the full path on your screens.
With such a small screen, it's hard to see all the fonts. So let's filter out the fonts that start with "ter".
After that, use the command "setfont" to set any of the above fonts. I selected "ter-v16n"
And hooray - now there's a new font in the console!
And since some of the fonts support several code tables at once, we can now see not only English but also Russian letters.
And not to lie - I will open my own article in a text browser.
As you can see, the Russian letters are displayed without any problems, and we can enjoy the text in Russian.
The only nuance is that you will keep this font until the first reboot. So how do you save it and make it apply with the system startup?
The answer is quite simple. We go, as "root" open the file "vconsole.conf", and in the variable "FONT" set the name of our font.
Save and reboot. It's done.
Similar font sets work not only in Linux, but also in the GRUB loader.
If you open the folder with any theme for this loader, you will see the familiar font system. But that's another story now.
So what's the conclusion?
Making your own font is, in principle, very easy. First, you have to have a desire, and second, you have to imagine what the font will look like.
There are a huge number of fonts: serif, sans serif, handwritten, monospaced, poster or ad fonts, decorative fonts - and the list goes on.
In essence, the entire design of a typeface is limited to the imagination of the person who creates it.
Some may agree with this statement and all the information in the video, and some may not.
But if there are any comments, welcome to the comments, they are always open.
Well, that's all I wanted to show you.
Thank you all for watching! Leave a like if you like this video.
You can also subscribe to my channel to support my creativity - I will be very pleased.
See you later!
[*little cough, sorry* :3]
See you later!