Here is a little peek under the hood :)

I added the lowercase to this font today, I'm curious what u guys think of it so far, and what might needs some extra work, all tips and suggestions are welcome, more will follow soon

cheers!

Another update made to this today!

• Many new characters and symbols added

• Adjusted many letterforms to make them look slightly better

• Kerning applied to most pairs (not completed the full font yet)

But its definitely decent enough now to make it downloadable,

I hope y'all like it. :)

Today's update:

• Ligatures added

• Additional extra punctuations added

• Started addding extended Latin string

And a little bit of the fontstruction under the hood again, in the bottom left of the image is the ring diacritic and to the right is the Ogonek.

Well everybody, I am pleased to announce the final update for this font.

I couldn't be more happy with the final result. I really enjoyed making it.

It includes plenty of typographic features that will suit a variety of different

tasks.

----

Specifications:

• Multi (Latin)-language support:
- Basic Latin
- Latin Supplement
- Latin Extended-A

• Numerous punctuations & symbols
• Typographic & stylistic ligatures

----

I hope y'all like it.  :)

It seems something is wrong when generating a TTF. Some of the kerning values that were applied doesn't seem to transfer to the generated TTF file.

So far I can verify the problem exists for the following characters.
F f L l R r T t

There might be more characters that are affected but I haven't found them yet. And somehow only the kerning value for the right side adjacent pairs of the character are missing/not applied. The left sides adjacent pairs all seem to function as should and still have their kerning value applied.

But, even stranger is, when I view the kerning settings in FontLab Studio, the value's do appear to be present and included in metrics table of the font. But no text editor or design software is applying this to the actual font when I use it!
 

See the provided image.

[Wow @ Meek] I don't know what it is that overtime got changed/fixed, but something in Fontstruct's back-end now handles the metrics tables (I think) different.

Thank you 100x for whatever you did boss, but this fixed all the previously corrupted / incomplete metrics data transport when a *.TTF file was generated for this font.

====================================================

So, 3 years ago when this was still a active WIP, I ren into some tech difficulties with the metrics data (kerning, sidebearing) not correctly transfered from the Fontstruct editor into the generated *.TTF font file.

And I did absolutely nothing to the project ever since due to this issue. But when I recently downloaded it again to use the font in a project, I noticed that the earlier issues I encountered, now magically had vanished and all seemed to look as if they had all been fixed, like nothing had ever happened to begin with. Now I can finally show the font in its true full form and glory!

====================================================

This is such a great prospect in general by the way, knowing this exact same issue manifested in a couple of other of my Fontstructions as well.

B-)

@Aphoria: Thanks mate, yeah sharing some of its inner-architecture wouldn't harm.

@Frodo: Wooahh that is a lot to digest. First of all thanks for such an elaborate comment.

About the diacritical marks, I understand what you mean by "mixed bag". And in fact I think there basically isn't a single one truly justifiable. Thanks once more for going in depth with such detail, this absolutely will be helpful.. I will revisit the diacritics soon while following your advice!

Cheers

@Frodo:
I made some significant changes in regard to your comment earlier. I think I adressed most, if not everything you pointed out.  Apart from one or two minor things I could find myself pretty much in line with everything you said. And I think together with the help of your guidance I managed to make things a whole lot better already.

- I will do a 'step-by-step' in depth explaination for al your criteria bellow.

Thanks a lot mate !!

:-)

Making improvements to this font ATM, also planning on the continuation of extending the character set and language support. For now I'm still in the process of making improvements to the font geometric properties, optical corrections and overall fine-tuning the visual qualities of the work.

[Update] Full monotonic Greek included, support for 93 languages in total at this point.

8067 stored kerning pairs included up to this point (will be resumed next time), but I need an urgent brake for now, both my hand and wrist feel quite sore after a couple of thousand kerned pairs.

@Elmoyenique:
I don't think a truly and fully fool-proof "smart kerning AI" will ever see the light of day.
Especially considering large typefaces with extended multi-lingual character sets and extensive Open Type-features. Multi-lingual typefaces that include multiple scripts and non-lingual characters increase the level of complexity in the underlying operating environment significantly, and simply create far too many variables.

There are numerous situations where preferably a secondary sets of rules would apply and overrule previously made calculations. But likely there will be a lot more of other conflicting criteria. So it simply would not be very practical to build a reliable analysis model for a simplified "one-stop" auto-kern function.
And my guess as to the prime reason and whole point of developing such a function in the first place is; to take away much of that tedious labor that is usually involved in this task. So one of it's key attributes should be a smart and intuitive front-end development that has both a clever and highly simplified UI that relies on a powerful auto-processing on it's back-end part. To even remotely realize such diagnostic technology would require serious numbers of individual data points that have to get analyzed in order to calculate proper kerning models for a typeface.
Analysis and processing times will be longer as increased levels of complexity are fed into the system. In return this generally speaking requires a greater deal of computing power as well.
All of which in one way or the other is taking it's toll on one of both ends of the spectrum in terms of it's functional qualities, and just stacks up.

I think that when for a system to function properly it would require this certain critical but minimum amount of large-bulk-data, there eventually is this point at which the level of complexity is going to outweigh functionality, and the whole idea becomes more and more obsolete. Basically turning it into a choice between bad and worse, that either is going to affect the UI simplicity and autonomous behavior, or on the other end of the spectrum, have a significant effect on output quality and actual reliability.

And as far as machine learning technology goes I don't really know what the potential could be or what the future might hold. It's something I don't really know a lot about. What I do know about it, which sparks some hope in the end after all is; being a 'die-hard' audiophile and overall music tech/gear geek, I have seen quite a few spectacular innovative and clever new developments and technology in recent years which involved machine learning.

Nonetheless a very interresting idea and concept that many before us have already fried their brains on.

Thanks a lot for the TP boss, somewhere I was hoping this FontStruct would eventually reach this status! 😎

Happy to announce that I'm still actively working on this project as we speak.

Today I included another additional 694 new kerning pairs to the font.
—But thats only half of todays story

I eventually could not resist the lure and got reeled into the glyph canvas. So I also spend quite some time sculpting, adjusting and improving several things—such as; overall glyph geometry, curve quality, optical adjustments. So many letters had seen improvements in some way or another. Last but not least I somehow even managed to end up having squeezed in 80 some-odd additional new glyphs as well, mids all the other activity that was going on. I knew that I had done a couple, but 80 something came as a total surprise. Can't recall to have had that much of an expressionism burst. Seems that it wasn't an  'all technical and expanding kerning table'- update axionz this time.

Cheers

Font downloading unavailable, server returns a "504 gateway time-out".

Here is a hi-res version of the sample image posted above:

HI-RES VERSION OF SAMPLE IMAGE

@SUMMER701: "2000+ glyphs to add?"

I think you do not quite grasp the physiology on the "back-end" part of the FS-editor, but thats allright. Allow me to explain:

The number of bricks for "STF_DERBY" that are used in even a single lowecase glyph is huge (µ=200+/300+), uppercase and more complex letters/ligatures even exceed this number (300+) of bricks. This means that, compared with most Fontstructs, a single glyph's relative impact is very resource heavy.

Just to give you sort of an idea mathematically:

Take a Fontstruct's brick average for just a single glyph, Multiply this by the font's total glyph count, this roughly gives an estimate on just the amount of total bricks used to build a font within the editor canvas.
So, "STF_DERBY" for example has, lets just say give or take —300 bricks on avarage "per glyph". That equates to (300×791) = 237,300 bricks currently used in the canvas to build all the font's glyphs. And, since this is only based on just the lowercase's brick-avarage, GUARANTEED that this number in reality, is actually going to be far greater (so already this is quite a lot by any Fontstruct measures).

When a Fontstruct project is loaded into the Fontrstuct editor, all data contained within a Fontstruct project e.i., brick-composites, canvas entries, metrics (8000+ kern-pairs for STF_DERBY), a virtual copy of this data is stored in a "cache" memory (temporary memory).
Generally speaking these type of (large grid/many glyphs) style Fontstruct projects (and just the shear amount of information that is contained in these project data packages) are hugely taxing on both local and host memory resources, and will ultimately lead to a loss of responsiveness and increasingly poor performance for the Fontstruct editor due to the increase of network latency issues when working on these large and taxing Fontstruct projects.

So, for "STF_DERBY" the loss of performance at this point far outweighs the pleasure received from continuation.
Therefor is highly unlikely I will make any massive updates in the future.

Besides that, I took a much needed break from Fontstructing. During my final months of active participation I kind of had a number of bad user-experience/interactions, and I got more and more upset with how things were evolving within the community.
My own input back in response became more toxic as a result of this. That isn't the kind of input and footnote I eager to contribute and leave behind.
Nor did I still felt the need to constantly keep having to find myself in these conflicts over ethics as to what is "right" or "wrong", or whatever righteous principles should apply to another artist's moral compass when they themselves dealing with things like inspired works, revivals or copying (or should I say ripping-off) other peoples material. The amount of respect "some" people here have for another contributor's hard work, skill and creativity (things that usually take MANY years of practice to develop) is next to none. The downright and blatantly stealing of (partial-) glyph sets or even entire fonts without mention of any reference as to whom is the original creator what so ever. Trying to make it appear as if it was theirs in the first place. #fancypants-low-life disgracefull actions of people that want to short cut into this difficult craft, that even on the best of days would still be a tough nut and massively labor-intens process. Its this growing blister that exists online nowdays, this current new trend (it happened in DJing, photography, typography you name it, everywhere). People just want to BE that "someone" or "something", but NOT actually BECOMING them. Not into things for the ENTIRE ride or experience that comes from the actual REAL engagement in these crafts and learning process these require. People fail to understand that ONLY this is what TRULY makes a GENUINE artist. I mean, in the end its just the lie and illusions one find themselves in, that will ultimately pevail, not their contributions. But in the process they mess these very things up for those who are really into it for the actual sake of those things, and don't mind the long term dedication some of these things require.

I don't know what the future might hold for me to be honest, as for this moment it all feels like a broken love affair I do not want. Luckily I found huge relief in my good old "first-ever" and "long-time" love, that is: music composition. And as to how things are currently look and evolve in terms of music, it might so happen that I will not (if ever) comming back to Fontstructing again soon. But who knows… Since myself on the other hand, DID go through all those steps (and far beyond) that are involved in learning my various crafts, and gaining the knowledge that enables me to do the things that I do (or did). So it is not likely I will unlearn those things any time soon. Therefor, perhaps some day, on that sunny afternoon, I might find my way back to Fontstructing.

Apologies to my fellow typophile friends and ALL who actually did REALLY care and enjoyed my contributions rather than exploiting them.

Thanks for everything we've shared,

Cheers

Ron