GiddeHand Half-Script Font

[Gidde]

Well, I have finished (sort of) and submitted my first font to dafont.com, but they only review submissions once a month! So I thought I'd upload it for the Guild now. I'll add in accented characters soon, but I just didn't have the gumption to kern them all today. In the meantime, the accents are there so with a little hacking you can make accented characters if you need them for a map. The font is meant to emulate a ball-point or other round-nib pen, and is an approximation of my actual handwriting.

Edit: The font is licensed "Free for personal use" as the editing software I have precludes its use for commercial fonts. If it gets a ton of downloads I plan on buying the pro version of the software and will relicense it.
2nd Edit: Updated the .zip to include a license file.
3rd Edit (2/3/2011): Uploaded a new version to fix a bug that prevented Microsoft programs from rendering the font correctly. Also slightly changed the shape of the capital letter G.


Enjoy! And as always if you see something wrong with it or want to leave other suggestions they're always welcome!

[jtougas]

Very cool. Kudos to you for trying something that has always seemed a little like magic to me. (and nice handwriting mine would rather like a bunch of angry lines all trying to eat one another)

[craggles]

Superb handwriting!

Is this for general use or only for personal maps?

As a designer, you can never have too many handwriting fonts.

[Gidde]

Thank you!!

My license for the font creation software precludes commercial use, so it's personal use only. If it turns out to be popular, I'm going to buy the pro version that allows commercial use and relicense it.

[ravells]

Superb work, Gidde!

Beautiful consistency with the letterforms.

What are you going to do for your next one?!!

[Gidde]

I hear ya there. Without even kerning the accented characters, GiddeHand has 887 kerning pairs. WOW that took a long time. I have a feeling that scripts/handwriting fonts are probably the hardest to kern. The one I'm doing now requires NO kerning pairs (woohoo) because it's meant to have even spacing between letters.

EDIT: How naive I was. Yes, there will still be kerning pairs >.<

[Gidde]

Thanks so much Ravs!

I'm already working on the next one *sheepish grin*

I have a few maps by Nicholas de Fer from the early 1700s and I'm making his beautiful (and non-copyrighted ) lettering into a whole series of fonts for us medieval mappers!

[ravells]

Yay! We've had guests round, so my 'Blair Hand' has had to wait a bit! Just about finished the lower case letters for the italics, but there's lots of tweaking to be done.

[jfrazierjr]

Are there bold/italic versions including the font package? Anyway, good job!

[Gidde]

Thanks! Not yet, and I don't actually plan on making an italic variant, but bold will be forthcoming. I'm still trying to learn the software and typography at the same time, and I'm not quite sure yet how to do bold the "right way"