Interesting medieval font

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Sgt. Groovy
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Interesting medieval font

Post by Sgt. Groovy »

While looking for some medieval fonts, I came across this, an extensive free-for-noncommercial-use font of Carolingian minuscule style, containing Gothic and runic alphabets as well. Could this be a candidate for an "official" Wesnoth font for such use as map labels etc. Since it contains plenty of accented characters it would be well suited for an international project (though alas, it doesn't have Greek or Cyrillic letters). It's fairly clean and should be easy to read in small sizes.
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silene
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Re: Interesting medieval font

Post by silene »

Sgt. Groovy wrote:free-for-noncommercial-use
This is not compatible with Wesnoth' license, since it doesn't preclude commercial use.
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Re: Interesting medieval font

Post by Sgt. Groovy »

I guess you're right, but the same would apply to the Celtic Garamond, currently used in the logo. It's also free only for non-commercial use.

I also found this, a whole collection of insanely good-looking medieval handwriting fonts. The license part is tricky, though, non-profit use is free, but must be approved by the author.
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Tiedäthän, solmu kravatin, se kantaa niin synnit
kuin syntien tekijätkin.
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Re: Interesting medieval font

Post by silene »

Sgt. Groovy wrote:I guess you're right, but the same would apply to the Celtic Garamond, currently used in the logo. It's also free only for non-commercial use.
If we are indeed using Celtic Garamond, that's bad and we should change it.
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Eleazar
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Re: Interesting medieval font

Post by Eleazar »

Opps...

Wasn't somebody redesigning the logo?
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Sgt. Groovy
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Re: Interesting medieval font

Post by Sgt. Groovy »

I am, and I have already suggested a change of the font (for artistic reasons as well), but there was no consensus reached about it.

A non-free font could well be used, if a commercial license for it would be obtained by someone in the project. The license would have to cover installation of the font on multiple computers, though, so that it could be redistributed to people doing internationalisation work. For the fonts I linked above, the license covers 100 installations, which should be well enough.
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Re: Interesting medieval font

Post by Eleazar »

Pfeffer Mediæval is gorgeous, but "Battle for Wesnoth" did not look especially good in it.

Assuming we were to purchase a license, which of the Pia Frauss fonts were you thinking of?
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Sgt. Groovy
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Re: Interesting medieval font

Post by Sgt. Groovy »

I haven't still decided, as there are so many of them. I would have to try some mock-ups with different effects.
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Re: Interesting medieval font

Post by LordBob »

Altogether I like the feel of the current font, in that it fits well with the gold inlay style of the letters.
What I see on Pia Frauss, however, really feels like ink and not metal since it's very rounded and looks, well, handwritten. I think adopting one of these fonts would require a drastic change of the existing lettering style (speaking of which, the "B" on their homepage is gorgeous. Is it any of the available fonts ?)
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Sgt. Groovy
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Re: Interesting medieval font

Post by Sgt. Groovy »

I am indeed working on different effects for the text, more suitable for a handwriting style font. One problem with the old metal effect is a rather weak resolution against the noisy map background.
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Re: Interesting medieval font

Post by kitty »

I'd have to back up LB on this issue. It's not only that our current effect works well on the inlay style letters - it's also that inlay style letters work well on top of the shield. I can't imagine a way to render all those scripture fonts in a way that would feel right to put on top of a shield as kind of a solid object. That's a pity because some of the ones in Groovy's link are real beauties, but just a wrong direction.

I suggest looking into fonts used for carving in stone and the like to get more of a massive feeling. I could imagine some nice Rotunda (you know, the later, softer kind of Textura) combined with more decorative capitals or something like that.

Regarding the question of licensing and pricing - since there doesn't seem to be a fitting and qualitatively acceptable font in the free world, we are probably going to obtain a commercial font, right? What is our budget? Since that pretty much dictates what kinds of sites we can use for searching…
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Sgt. Groovy
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Re: Interesting medieval font

Post by Sgt. Groovy »

I could imagine some nice Rotunda (you know, the later, softer kind of Textura) combined with more decorative capitals or something like that.
That, or a Schwabacher. Earlier I was firmly against any font of the blackletter family, because of the heavy metal and goth connotations, but after some research I've come to think that some rounder one with interesting swashes might do nicely. So far I haven't looked into the commercial ones that much, but if we are going to go that way anyway...
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kuin syntien tekijätkin.
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Re: Interesting medieval font

Post by Jetrel »

Sgt. Groovy wrote:
I could imagine some nice Rotunda (you know, the later, softer kind of Textura) combined with more decorative capitals or something like that.
That, or a Schwabacher. Earlier I was firmly against any font of the blackletter family, because of the heavy metal and goth connotations, but after some research I've come to think that some rounder one with interesting swashes might do nicely. So far I haven't looked into the commercial ones that much, but if we are going to go that way anyway...
Those connotations might be an extremely local phenomenon, seeing as how finland/scandinavia/etc are kinda the current home of black metal and such. I for one have absolutely zero connotation between goths and blackletter fonts - to me, when I see blackletter fonts, it makes me think of "merry olde england", and stuff like robin hood (due to some loose similarity to english fonts).
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Re: Interesting medieval font

Post by thespaceinvader »

Blackletter rings more of traditional broadsheet newspaper logos to me ;) It's very situational though.
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Noy
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Re: Interesting medieval font

Post by Noy »

Sgt. Groovy wrote:I am, and I have already suggested a change of the font (for artistic reasons as well), but there was no consensus reached about it.

A non-free font could well be used, if a commercial license for it would be obtained by someone in the project. The license would have to cover installation of the font on multiple computers, though, so that it could be redistributed to people doing internationalisation work. For the fonts I linked above, the license covers 100 installations, which should be well enough.
Thats also incompatible with GPL unfortunately.

kitty wrote:I'd have to back up LB on this issue. It's not only that our current effect works well on the inlay style letters - it's also that inlay style letters work well on top of the shield. I can't imagine a way to render all those scripture fonts in a way that would feel right to put on top of a shield as kind of a solid object. That's a pity because some of the ones in Groovy's link are real beauties, but just a wrong direction.

I suggest looking into fonts used for carving in stone and the like to get more of a massive feeling. I could imagine some nice Rotunda (you know, the later, softer kind of Textura) combined with more decorative capitals or something like that.

Regarding the question of licensing and pricing - since there doesn't seem to be a fitting and qualitatively acceptable font in the free world, we are probably going to obtain a commercial font, right? What is our budget? Since that pretty much dictates what kinds of sites we can use for searching…
While I agree that we should probably change the font to something GPL compatible, its not an issue we need to rush on. Its kinda like the old sprites issue; we can wait until we find an good alternative.

I'd suggest the Art Devs keep it in the back of their minds, until they can find a free font or a type designer who can come up with something that we can license.
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