Add lower case letters

[seanthegeek]

I realize the last update was four months ago, but would it be possible to add lower case letters? They are necessary for syntactically correct programs like this:

http://xkcd.com/221/

[takluyver]

I don't think any of us (IPython devs) have the font-making skills to produce the remaining glyphs - all we've done since we got the font is a bit of tweaking. If you (are/can find) someone who has the necessary skills, I think we'd be happy to accept contributions.

[rgbkrk]

Just emailed with Randall and he's going to provide a super hi res image of the lowercase glyphs. Next up from there is vectorizing that image and converting it to the open font format we're using (Spline Font Database - SFD).

[randallmunroe]

Vectorizing should be pretty easy; Illustrator livetrace can handle it pretty easily—black and white line art is easy to vectorize :) I'll see if I can get you something a little later this week.

Best, Randall

On Sun, Dec 15, 2013 at 5:54 PM, Kyle Kelley notifications@github.comwrote:

Just emailed with Randall and he's going to provide a super hi res image of the lowercase glyphs. Next up from there is vectorizing that image and converting it to the open font format we're using (Spline Font Database - SFD).

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/ipython/xkcd-font/issues/9#issuecomment-30624285 .

[ellisonbg]

Thanks Randall!

On Sun, Dec 15, 2013 at 2:59 PM, randallmunroe notifications@github.comwrote:

Vectorizing should be pretty easy; Illustrator livetrace can handle it pretty easily—black and white line art is easy to vectorize :) I'll see if I can get you something a little later this week.

Best, Randall

On Sun, Dec 15, 2013 at 5:54 PM, Kyle Kelley notifications@github.comwrote:

Just emailed with Randall and he's going to provide a super hi res image of the lowercase glyphs. Next up from there is vectorizing that image and

converting it to the open font format we're using (Spline Font Database

SFD).

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub< https://github.com/ipython/xkcd-font/issues/9#issuecomment-30624285> .

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/ipython/xkcd-font/issues/9#issuecomment-30624395 .

Brian E. Granger Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo bgranger@calpoly.edu and ellisonbg@gmail.com

[rgbkrk]

Yay, thanks Randall! :+1:

[seanthegeek]

Awesome! Thanks Randall!

[Carreau]

Also, I might be possible to set-up mathjax to use some of @randallmunroe writing to render math. This might be relevant, it seem to say that it is possible, but might be quite hard in some places.

[randallmunroe]

I made an image with an alphabet of lowercase letters, plus some words written out to get an idea of variation/digraph kerning. You can see that I'm inconsistent about how I do my lowercase L and lowercase I. sometimes I include the little serif-y twists at the end (I don't know what they're called), but when I'm writing more quickly/casually I don't. I do lowercase lettering rarely enough that I've never settled on a standard!

I'm enough of a github noob that I've lost track of where any of this stuff is happening, so I'm just going to attach these to this email and hope that they reach someone who knows where they should go :) Let me know if they don't! I've included both the original PNG file and an SVG vector version. I just made it by clicking "live trace" in Illustrator using the default settings. It could probably be improved by playing with the settings a little more.

On the subject of digraphs, I was trying to find a way to strike a balance between sentence length and covering the digraphs used most frequently. So rather than just trying to generate the shortest sentence possible that covered all the digraphs in the dictionary, I was trying to generate the shortest sentence that covered a given percentage of a given corpus's digraphs. So covering more common digraphs would be more "valuable".

Just for the hell of it, I've also attached my Python code, but I don't actually recommend reading it. I just saw other people asking about it and I forget whether I linked it or not. It's terrible code—it's one of those things that changed a lot as I worked on the problem, and If I were writing it from scratch, I would dump everything I'd written in favor of something much simpler and more mathematically straightforward. But maybe someone who's good at reading Python can get a dailywtf submission out of it :P

Best wishes, Randall

On Tue, Dec 17, 2013 at 8:27 AM, Matthias Bussonnier < notifications@github.com> wrote:

Also, I might be possible to set-up mathjax to use some of @randallmunroehttps://github.com/randallmunroewriting to render math. Thishttps://github.com/mathjax/mathjax-docs/wiki/Can-MathJax-use-font-xxxx%3Fmight be relevant, it seem to say that it is possible, but might be quite hard in some places.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/ipython/xkcd-font/issues/9#issuecomment-30750234 .

[rgbkrk]

I think GitHub stripped your attachment, so all we got was your text. You can email any of us directly if you like @randallmunroe, then I'll just make it available. If you want to add the image directly, I think you would have to login to GitHub and attach it to a comment.

[randallmunroe]

Sure, sent them to Kyle!

I couldn't figure out how to attach files to a comment. I know I should just clone into the repo and submit a pull request or something—I'll learn to do that sooner or later! I feel like I'm someone's dad sending notes to people by writing it in his Facebook status because he doesn't know how to use messaging :)

On Thu, Dec 19, 2013 at 8:32 AM, Kyle Kelley notifications@github.comwrote:

I think GitHub stripped your attachment, so all we got was your text. You can email any of us directly if you like @randallmunroehttps://github.com/randallmunroe, then I'll just make it available. If you want to add the image directly, I think you would have to login to GitHub and attach it to a comment.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/ipython/xkcd-font/issues/9#issuecomment-30928271 .

[Carreau]

I couldn't figure out how to attach files to a comment.

You cannot by mail, you have to use the web interface and drop the image on the textarea, but I think it resizes images so no good. And you have to reach the mouse.

You could have also just put it somewhere on the internet and pasted the link :-)

I feel like I'm someone's dad sending notes to people by writing it in his Facebook status because he doesn't know how to use messaging :)

There is a difference ? Facebook is not just about the like button ?

[kweis]

Hi @rgbkrk, did you end up putting the lower case letters up for the public? I'm hoping to use this font on a poster, but would really like to make use of the upper and lowers if they're available!

[rgbkrk]

D'oh. Kept meaning to come back to this. Thanks for the ping @kolbylyn.

Here is the PNG Randall sent over. .

I can't attach the .svg or the digraph.py but I could send all of them in a pull request.

Alternatively... I could just upload them to a CDN for now.

Here are all the files Randall sent over:

• lowercase-glyphs.png
• default-trace-lowercase-glyphs.svg
• digraph.py

[randallmunroe]

Oh, and as I mentioned in the email, I am a little inconsistent about whether I include the little curly end thingies on the lowercase l (L) and lowercase i. I don't letter in lowercase often enough to have settled on one or the other. So you might want to use a version from the bottom set rather than the ones from the top.

On Sun, Dec 22, 2013 at 11:12 PM, Kyle Kelley notifications@github.comwrote:

D'oh. Kept meaning to come back to this. Thanks for the ping @kolbylynhttps://github.com/kolbylyn .

Here is the PNG Randall sent over. [image: lowercase-glyphs]https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/836375/1799135/87448bee-6b87-11e3-8721-5a11314079fd.png .

I can't attach the .svg or the digraph.py but I could send all of them in a pull request.

Alternatively... I could just upload them to a CDN for now.

Here are all the files Randall sent over:

• lowercase-glyphs.pnghttps://810cff3fe54213d9d3c3-94ac6c5dde12e2efffc396fc03a6be65.ssl.cf5.rackcdn.com/lowercase-glyphs.png
• default-trace-lowercase-glyphs.svghttps://810cff3fe54213d9d3c3-94ac6c5dde12e2efffc396fc03a6be65.ssl.cf5.rackcdn.com/default-trace-lowercase-glyphs.svg
• digraph.pyhttps://810cff3fe54213d9d3c3-94ac6c5dde12e2efffc396fc03a6be65.ssl.cf5.rackcdn.com/digraph.py

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/ipython/xkcd-font/issues/9#issuecomment-31103684 .

[ellisonbg]

Hi @randallmunroe and everyone

Merry Christmas!

We are working on the lowercase letters and are trying to identify the basic vertical sizes of the font (ascender, descender, x-height). There are a couple of issues we are running into:

• We don't have a sample of your writing that has both uppercase and lowercase letters. This makes it difficult to see how the overall height of the uppercase letters compares to the ascenders of the lowercase letters (b, d, l, etc.).
• If we make the assumption that the height of the uppercase letters is equal to the lowercase ascenders, and scale things accordingly, it appears that when you drew the uppercase letters, you used a slightly wider pen. The screenshot below shows this with the previously scanned A scaled next to a few of the lowercase letters.

Is there any chance we could bother you for:

• Another scan of the uppercase letters using the same pen and overall line height as the lowercase ones. Having the uppercase and lowercase letters together in a single scan would probably yield the best overall result.
• Scan of text that includes both upper and lowercase letters so we can determine their relative scale.

If this is too much trouble, we can try to reduce the stroke width of the uppercase letters in Illustrator...

Have a great day!

[kweis]

I know this thread is old news, but way back when I meant to attach the project I used these fonts for! I doubt anyone thought the xkcd font would make it to a professional conference, but it was a hit and I figure anyone interested in astronomy (esp. @randallmunroe with all the What If? astro questions) might be interested in seeing it.

(the PDF is at http://staff.washington.edu/kweis/kweis_aas223.pdf)

Thanks again!

[takluyver]

Nice. The matplotlib guys managed to get a paper published with an XKCD style figure:

http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1003833#s10

[ellisonbg]

Did you see that we do have this:

https://github.com/ipython/xkcd-font/blob/master/rawdata/lowercase/lowercase-glyphs.png

On Tue, Jul 14, 2015 at 10:40 AM, thenoncoder notifications@github.com wrote:

@randallmunroe https://github.com/randallmunroe, can you upload a single png file of a hi-res scan of every single letter and number and symbol etc? That would be a lot better than having a lot of files, and better than writing complete words and sentences. If you do provide the file, I'll vectorize it, and it if I have time, I'll also make a proper font outta it.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/ipython/xkcd-font/issues/9#issuecomment-121285004.

Brian E. Granger Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo @ellisonbg on Twitter and GitHub bgranger@calpoly.edu and ellisonbg@gmail.com

[ellisonbg]

Ahh, missed that.

On Tue, Jul 21, 2015 at 6:42 AM, thenoncoder notifications@github.com wrote:

@ellisonbg https://github.com/ellisonbg There are no mathematical glyphs though, and that was what I was talking about!

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/ipython/xkcd-font/issues/9#issuecomment-123309071.

Brian E. Granger Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo @ellisonbg on Twitter and GitHub bgranger@calpoly.edu and ellisonbg@gmail.com

[randallmunroe]

Don't know which part it's helpful with, but here's a big file with two versions of uppercase letters (I did this twice, I forgot), the lowercase ones from before, and every common punctuation/math symbol I could think of offhand :)

Temporary link, in case attachments don't work:

http://xkcd.com/temp/many-glyphs.png

On Tue, Jul 21, 2015 at 8:09 PM, Brian E. Granger notifications@github.com wrote:

Ahh, missed that.

On Tue, Jul 21, 2015 at 6:42 AM, thenoncoder notifications@github.com wrote:

@ellisonbg https://github.com/ellisonbg There are no mathematical glyphs though, and that was what I was talking about!

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/ipython/xkcd-font/issues/9#issuecomment-123309071.

Brian E. Granger Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo @ellisonbg on Twitter and GitHub bgranger@calpoly.edu and ellisonbg@gmail.com

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/ipython/xkcd-font/issues/9#issuecomment-123513705.

[rgbkrk]

Reattached the many-glyphs.png:

Thanks Randall!

[HughP]

Thank you Randall!!

BTW: Any hope for IPA Characters re #11 ? (some are obviously the same as already supplied) see chart: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8f/IPA_chart_%28C%292005.pdf

[kakumarabhishek]

Hi! Any progress with the lowercase letters?

[takluyver]

I don't think anyone has been working on this for quite a while.

[ghost]

Lower case letters are done by me, but still there is a little problem with the thickness of the uppercase and lowercase letters. I'm not good enough to extract them of a png file, but if we can get them in a vector graphic type i'll merge them together in one file. Also there is a known bug in Gimp. The newest font version doesn't work with GIMP (for me, maybe someone will test this) The letters are crumbled in some way. But they do work in MS Office Word, newest Photoshop version and HTML/CSS.

[rgbkrk]

Closed in #13, #15.