[Openfontlibrary] Aurulent Sans

[Denis Jacquerye]

On 5/5/07, Stephen Hartke <hartke at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello!  Aurulent Sans is a sans serif font I'm developing for use as the
> primary interface font on X Windows on GNU/Linux. I am developing it using
> MetaType1 and FontForge. A preliminary release is available at
> http://www.geocities.com/hartke01/
> At the moment, I am interested in feedback before proceeding to polish the
> fonts for release (which is why I haven't uploaded the fonts to the
> OpenFontLibrary website).  I have been using Aurulent Sans as my primary
> interface font (and the monospace version for my terminal) for over a year
> now, and have found it quite agreeable.  However, I am aware that
> over-familiarity can breed complacency, and there might be some obvious
> fixes that are needed.  I welcome comments anyone has for improvement.

Aurulent looks really nice. Awesome work. It can definitely become a
standard font.

- At first I got the impression g stands out a bit much, it might be
too original with such an open lower bowl, although I eventually got
used to it.
- I find the bar of the f a bit short on the right in Regular, it's
almost the same length as the bar of t in Bold which looks more
balanced.
- There's something odd with v, w and y in Italic. Maybe v, w should
be more similar to y, or vice versa.
- Diacritics are a bit much to the right on C and G. But looking at
U+0134, U+013D and U+01E9 with off diacritics, composed glyphs
probably need polishing too. I suggest placing anchors on a visually
centered axis and then build accented accent through Fontforge. This
way it will be consistent through pre-composed glyphs and with
composed characters.
- Combining diacritcs should probably be centered on X=0 and have zero
advance width, at least if you want to follow the OpenType definition.
Otherwise, they should have their contour in the negative range for
legacy system that cannot use anchors to position them. This doesn't
apply to the Mono font, where all characters need to have the same
advance width, but you can use OT features to fix it.
- When you do polishing, remember to removed duplicate points, there
are a few like the top point of 'a', also remember to round
coordinates and bearings.
If you want to make it easier to interpolate weight variant fonts,
make sure each glyph has the same number of point and the same order
in Regular and Bold.

Let us know if/how we can contribute glyphs or features.

Cheers,

Denis Moyogo Jacquerye