More obliques and italics

 While adding characters to fonts so that they will meet the Monotype minimum-character requirement, I decided to add some oblique styles because they are easy to do and they can make the family more useful. Recently added are obliques and italics to GalexicaMono, SusiScript, FebDrei, and Yahosch.

An oblique style simply slants the upright style with no changes in letter forms. The new styles of FebDrei and Yahosch qualify as italics rather than obliques. The new FedDrei styles alter the letters f and k  and the new Yahosch styles alter the letters a and f. 

The characters that are most commonly missing in the fonts I am updating include the copyright and registered symbols, the section symbol, and the multiplication sign. When I designed fonts more than twenty years ago, I did not think those characters and some others were important, so I often omitted them.

Additions and revivals

I initially intended only at add characters to the four fonts of WhichIt and WhichItTwo, which are quirky, geometric faces that have letter shapes based on a hexagon that has four sides of one length and the other two of a much longer length. They were not created with any purpose in mind but only to see what a set of letters based on this shape would look like. As I added characters, I noticed that there was a large gap between the regular and bold weights, so I constructed an intermediate weight that may be more usable than the two existing weights. Adding italics styles did not require much effort so I added them for all the weights. What started as a fairly minor expansion of characters ended up tripling the size of the family. In the picture below the new members of the family are shown in yellow.

One of the first typefaces I designed was a sans-serif face that briefly sold on a disk produced by a company called Educorp. It was a beginner's effort that was quickly retired. However, in the late 1990s, I ran it through a font-distortion program that "grunged" it up, hiding its many imperfections. As 2021 began I decided to revive it, adding many accented and other characters. TRGrunge is available from fontspring.

A spiky start to 2021

 For about ten years, from the early 1990s until 2002, I sold typefaces mostly on CDs. I designed typefaces for three CDs sold by the short-lived company Wayzata Technologies. After it folded, I published my own CD that include what had been on those three CDs plus a bit more. When the technology to cheaply burn CDs from a personal computer arrived, I added a CD of novelty fonts. This method of selling gave me an incentive to produce lots of typefaces and that incentive attracted me to a couple of font distortion programs that were published in the 1990s. I used one to produce about a dozen fonts with spikes or spines on the letters that were included on my novelty-font CD. 

In 2002 I learned of a better way of selling typefaces, through an on-line font vendor. I happily abandoned CDs, upgraded my typefaces where needed, and submitted most of them to myfonts.com and fonts.com. To start off 2021 I have resurrected seven spiked typefaces that I did not move to myfonts.com, renamed them, expanded them to include more accented characters, corrected problems I found, and generated the font files with FontLab 7 so they include some common OpenType features. I added four spiked fonts that I had moved to myfonts, renaming and expanding them as well. The resulting eleven typefaces make up the Kaktis collection on fontspring.com. Like all novelty fonts, they have limited uses but there can be situations in which one is just what is needed. 

It is remarkable how much digital type has changed since I started playing with it in the late 1980s. When I started the only PostScript I could make was Type 3, which did not have some features that Adobe kept for itself. In addition to the PostScript file, one needed a bitmap file so the type would be visible on the screen. Apple developed TrueType to do an end-run around Adobe, but Microsoft was the primary promoter of this new format. Then the OpenType format was introduced and almost entirely replaced old PostScript format. I suspect all the formats available now will be obsolete in 20 years.