Glyph design: lowercase letters with legs (h m u)

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The letters ‘h’, ‘m’, and ‘u’ mean something slightly different to type designers than they do to most people. These letters can be grouped together because they can all be very easily derived from the lowercase ‘n’. You could also include ‘r’, but the ‘r’ is slightly trickier to make, so that will be in another post.

Components of a lowercase ‘h’ and ‘m’.

Components of a lowercase ‘u’

As with the ‘p’, ‘d’, and ‘q’, passable versions of ‘h’ and ‘m’ can be made just by copying and extending parts from the letter ‘n’. The ‘h’ is largely an ‘n’ with a raised ascender, and the ‘m’ can be built by fusing two ‘n’s together.

And just like with the ‘p’, ‘d’, and ‘q’, there are small changes that will make these letters better. The shoulder of the ‘h’ is often rounder and less steep than that of the ‘n’ (though I made the ‘n’s shoulder rounder too). The ‘h’ is also very slightly wider than the ‘n’. The ‘m’ really is in many ways just an ‘n’ with an extra arc and stem, though the letter is usually slightly compressed so that it isn't literally a ligature of two ‘n’s. Key word—slightly—many designers overdo it on the compression and make ‘m’s that are too dense. The ‘m’ compression is very subtle—often just a small fraction (one fifth?) of the stem width. Remember that serifs on the inside of a letter are slightly shorter than on the outside.

Glyph design: lowercase letters with bowls (d p q)

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The letters ‘d’, ‘p’, and ‘q’ all possess bowls that are incredibly similar to that of the ‘b’. Although the bowls are not exactly identical, they can all be very easily derived from the ‘b’.

All four letters can be related to each other. The letter ‘p’ is traditionally thought of as a letter ‘b’ with its ascender depressed, and given a descender. The ‘d’ in turn is made by rotating the ‘p’ 180 degrees, and replacing its bilateral serif with an angled head serif. The ‘q’ is then made by removing the ascender from the ‘d’ and adding a descender, much like making the ‘p’ from the ‘b’. The descenders are almost always the same length as the ascenders. It's also possible to derive all the letters from one of the four letters—the ‘b’-centric method is shown below.

The lowercase ‘p’, ‘d’, and ‘q’, related to the ‘b’

A passable ‘p’, ‘d’, and ‘q’ can be made by just reflecting the ‘b’ and sliding the stem up and down. In fact, quite a few commercial designers just leave these letters like that.

A quality typeface will, however, have a few tweaks for each letter. The bowl–stem joins of the ‘p’ and ‘d’ are usually steeper, and their bowls are more diagonally elongated. Out of the four letters, ‘q’ and ‘b’ resemble each other the most, with ‘q’ in most ways being a ‘b’ rotated 180 degrees. Most old style ‘q’s ,however, have a small spur on their upper right corner. Also keep in mind that when you have a bilateral serif (like in ‘p’ and ‘q’), the half on the side the letter would “fall over” on should be slightly longer than the other half of the serif.

If you are following along with your own typeface, at this point you should have twelve letters in your font. Congratulations—you are almost halfway through the lowercase alphabet!

From typeface to font—part two: Font metrics and importing into fontforge

 Part one »

Since I drew the glyphs in a vector program, Inkscape, the letters are technically already digitized. If I had drawn them out on paper I would have to scan and then trace the glyphs. But before we can copy and paste glyphs into a font, we must first understand exactly how a font deals with all those little em rectangles.

Fonts subdivide ems into an arbitrary number of font units which they use as their internal coordinate system. For a truetype font (one that ends in .ttf), each em is typically broken down into 1024 or 2048 font units. In the newer opentype format (.otf), each em usually contains 1000 font units, though this isn’t a requirement.

The origin of a font’s coordinate system is usually displaced some distance upwards, giving rise to negative coordinates. The x-axis is used as the baseline of the typeface. Typically, the displacement is between one quarter and one fifth of an em unit, so a font’s em rectangle might extend all the way up to 780 font units, and all the way down to –220 font units, giving a total height of one thousand font units. Letter parts can be found outside of this range—the descender of a ‘p’ might reach a coordinate of –235 font units, but if the text is set with no leading, the descender will intrude into the next line's em rectangles.

Vertical metrics of Proforma. Proforma has an ascent of 0.8 ems and a descent of 0.2 ems.

The app we’re going to use to put the glyphs into a font is called FontForge. It’s free and open source and at the time of writing, still being actively developed (after a period of dormancy). I won’t go over how to install it as there are plenty of guides on how to do so. I recommend building fontforge from its source code. It's easier than it sounds and the build guide holds your hand every step of the way. Plus the precompiled fontforge packages tend to be very old and buggy, so building from source is a good way of ensuring freshness.

From typeface to font—part one: The em square

Up to this point, I have not technically been making a font, rather sketching a typeface design. Everyone has slightly different interpretations on what the two words mean, but generally, a typeface is taken to mean a design that may include multiple styles (regular, italic, bold, etc), and a font is a piece of software (or in the old days, a boxed set of metal type) that prints the letters in the shape of the typeface.

A font is a technical implementation of a typeface. The typeface is what we’ve been making so far. I used a simple vector drawing program (Inkscape), but you could use a pen and paper to sketch the glyphs too. But for an app like a word processor or web browser to use the letters we’ve drawn, the glyphs need to be digitized and packaged in a font file. Font files store the letters of the typeface in specific spots that apps know to look in to find that particular glyph. All modern font formats also include information on letter width and kerning (custom letter spacing), and some can do stuff like substitute ligatures and toggle on and off old style figures (we’ll get to those).

Before you can start putting a font together, though, you have to work out the em size. The em is the height of an imaginary rectangle than the letters of your font are mounted on. In the days of metal type, the em was an actual block of metal that had the letter on it (each metal block with its letter was called a sort). The em could be different sizes—an 8 point em would be half the size of a 16 point em, and the letter on the sort would scale with the em.

An actual piece of metal type (the fi glyph) from Garamond.
Credit Daniel Ullrich, on Wikimedia Commons

When you typeset text, you line up a bunch of these rectangles with the letters you want—digital or back then, metal—and arrange them in rows to form a paragraph. In metal typesetting you would put strips of lead in between the lines to space them out. Double spaced type would have strips that were one em high—the same as the height of the sorts. These strips were called the leading, pronounced “ledding”. It’s still called that today, except now computers insert virtual leading instead of actual metal strips to set the line spacing.

Text from Wikipedia

However, sometimes you might want to know how big the pieces of type used were—i.e. the English teacher who wants to know if a paper was set in twelve point type. If you know the leading, you can figure out the type size (the reason they ask for it double spaced), but otherwise, it is impossible to tell how big the original sorts were.

Test run: All together now!

Once you have the ‘a’, ‘o’, ‘i’, ‘b’, ‘n’, ‘v’, and ‘e’, it’s a good idea to put all your glyphs together and see how the typeface works, like this:

You should best be doing this every time you draw a new glyph, actually—like I've been doing behind the scenes. But if you've put it off until now, it's a good idea to iron out all the inconsistencies at this point, before the ‘b’ parents the ‘d’, ‘p’, and ‘q’, and you have maybe four letters to fix instead of one. While the curves should not be exactly the same, the curves of the ‘a’, ‘n’, ‘b’, and ‘f’ should evoke the same shape; the bowls of the ‘o’, ‘e’, and ‘b’ should have similar hardnesses; and all the glyphs should have roughly the same hairline thicknesses, and appear to be the same weight.

Now is also a good time to enact sweeping changes to your font, like weight or serif shape. For example, I noticed that my typeface was looking a bit too heavy for a book weight. It would be nice for a medium weight, but I prefer to work with lighter weights, so I made the typeface lighter. I also made the head serifs slightly thinner and less angled.

You should also pay attention to the over and undershoots—as it turns out, the undershoot on the ‘v’ was a bit too much, and the ‘f’ was a little shorter than the ‘b’. So having all the letters next to each other helps you find and correct problems like that.

It’s also a good idea to scale the glyphs up and down to see how the typeface performs at display and more importantly, text sizes. Here’s my typeface scaled down to three text sizes, with their baselines and side bearings aligned to pixels to provide natural hinting:

In my case, it’s encouraging since it indicates that my typeface is already legible down to a baseline–meanline height of just 7 pixels.

Glyph design: the lowercase e

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The ‘e’ is probably the last character you should design before stepping back and taking a good look at how your glyphs look together. Oh you could go and make the ‘x’ too, but I like to draw the line at ‘e’.

The ‘e’ is one of the hardest letters to draw and design—probably third only to ‘s’ and ‘g’. While commonly thought of as an ‘o’ with a crossbar and a gap cut out of its lower right, the ‘e’ is really more of a spiral that ends abruptly with a crossbar.

      While the letter shares little else in common, like the ‘b’, the ‘e’ is elongated diagonally and can be thought of as having two axes—an axis that the counter (or what would be the counter if the letter was closed and had no crossbar) is aligned to (pink), and another “outer axis” (gold) that the outer contour is aligned with.

Left to right: Minion Pro, Garamond, Sorts Mill Goudy

Glyph design: the lowercase f

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     Oh, my favorite letter—'f' ! The 'f' is a rather straightforward letter to design; the main difficulties lie in the proportions. It is very easy to make an 'f' that looks unstable, and designers are also prone to making 'f's that are stubby or inelegant.

     Except for the tricky arc of stem (called a hook, in the 'f'), 'f' is basically an 'i' or 'l' with a cross stroke. The cross stroke is an important part of the 'f' since it's one of the most distinctive parts of the letter, and also because it will be reused in 't' and many special characters.

Components of a lowercase 'f'

     The hook of the 'f' cannot be derived from any letters we have drawn so far. You can't use the arc of stem of the 'a', since that arc goes in the opposite direction (and you should only reflect a glyph over one axis with great caution). The shoulder of the 'n' is also unsuitably round and wide. So we have to start from a blank constructed from an 'i' and a 'b', and design the letter from that.