Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Artabanus]

Art, as you can see in the preview, I made a few changes to your choice of glyphs and knocked all the curves and rounded edges away to give the font a very rigid appearance.  If you have no objections, I'd like to go with the basic shapes of these glyphs as the working versions for Napanii script.  Handwritten and artistic renderings of the glyphs would incorporate stroke order to give everyday Napanii a distinctive, Hangul-like look.  This is something we can look at for additional font faces.

Ken...

Dude...beautiful work...I was just working on improving the look of the fonts, when I checked the forum, and saw the Military font. Very nice. Absolutely no objection on my part.

I do have a question: do you think that in official Caldari State culture and training, that Napanii would be written vertically, as in Chinese and Korean? Right to left, or left to right? I ask not for how we should write in it. Just a thought that I had about what the Caldari might do. I guess its more of a fiction question.

Another question: what software did you use to manipulate the glyphs? Just curious.

Beautiful work. I plan to release the primer with the changes and the font on my website this upcoming Friday (http://www.evechronicles.com).

As soon as I get those phonological changes done, I'll post to see what you think.

Thanks.

Art

[Artabanus]

Hey Ken (and all others):

Here is a reworking of your font; this one has all the glyphs the same size. I've called it Napanii Military Equiblock.

I've done a bit of experimenting with six of the State Eight logos also.

Enjoy

Art

[attachment deleted by admin]

[Artabanus]

              

[orange]

I do have a question: do you think that in official Caldari State culture and training, that Napanii would be written vertically, as in Chinese and Korean? Right to left, or left to right? I ask not for how we should write in it. Just a thought that I had about what the Caldari might do. I guess its more of a fiction question.

Perhaps it can be read in any direction?  A starting & ending character indicates which direction to read the characters?

A very basic Raata crypto was to remove these characters and create a bloc of characters that when read contained several overlapping messages.*

*speculation

[Artabanus]

Hmmm...interesting concept...I like it.

Art

[Ken]

do you think that in official Caldari State culture and training, that Napanii would be written vertically, as in Chinese and Korean? Right to left, or left to right?

Another question: what software did you use to manipulate the glyphs? Just curious.

Horizontally, left to right. 

Ancient Napanii was vertical, right to left, and this was attempted during the "beta testing" of modern Napanii.  The average citizen simply found it too unusual, Gallentean influences having long before brought everyday writing to a standard horizontal and left to right configuration across the Federation.  Reluctantly, the State linguists went with that format (already used by the other contemporary Caldari languages), but retained the vertical style for art and decoration.  The only thing I think we need to alter for vertical writing is to turn the vowels 90 degrees.

I also think that ancient Napanii should be considered a character-based language like Chinese or perhaps a hybrid of characters and alphabet(s) like Japanese.  Modern Napanii is entirely alphabetic and is written using the exact same or only slightly modified letters from the main group of Caldari languages that were in use on the homeworld at the start of the GalCal War.

And, I used Paint Shop Pro X2 and FontCreator 6.1

[Artabanus]

Ken:

Sounds great; I'm going to include these details in your primer.

This is so cool, I just have to say. Thanks for doing this.

Art

PD - I was actually using Photoshop for the design and FontCreator for font manipulation, but perhaps Photoshop is too high-powered.

[Ken]

I realized that the letters used for the double vowel combinations could actually be confused for a non-duplicate vowel pair.  The letter for "aa" could be misread as "ai", which is a combo that comes up often.

A E I O U AA II UU Y
B C D F G H J K KK L M N P R S SS T V W Z

I've reworked those letters and incorporated them into Napanii Equiblock 2 (attached to this post and previewed above), in which I also went back and tweaked the proportions on a few letters.  The marks that distinguish vowels from one another (their basic form is simply a single vertical line a la "|") are rendered above the line.  The vowel "stem" is the same height as the consonants and all other letters are of equal height.  I think this gives the font a uniform appearance while still providing emphasis on the placement of vowels and avoids giving them a squashed look.

Some examples of the font follow:

This is so cool, I just have to say. Thanks for doing this.

Hey, thanks for throwing your own ideas and motivation into the mix.

EDIT: Uploaded the font again with a change to the "e" letter, making it a mirror of "y"

EDIT: Few more examples of the font in use:





[attachment deleted by admin]

[Artabanus]

Great work Ken.

Thanks!

Art

[Ghost Hunter]

Oh hey guys what's goin on in this thr-

[walls of delicious Caldari racial language text, fluff and assorted details]



Hello there

[Jozana]

You and your crazy pictures....

[Silver Night]

Incredible work, guys.

[Artabanus]

Final results to be posted Friday both here and at Chronicles of EVE (http://www.evechronicles.com). I'll have some nice wallpapers up there too under the art section highlighting the new script, as well as two downloadable fonts for the Napanii script if anyone is interested.

Thanks.

Art

[orange]

Wait a second... I know those guys.

Good job.

[GoGo Yubari]

Interesting and good work! I'll admit to only reading the last few pages and looking at the results, but I'll still throw in a few comments. Overall, I think this looks very nice. I am a bit iffy on the use of a single letter to designate a double vowel. That's coming from me as a native Finnish speaker, btw.

If AA, EE, UU, YY and OO are single letters, so should AI, EI, UI, OI, AE, OE, UE, AU, EU, OU, etc. They're pretty much the same concept and having one designated by double letters and not the other does not seem logical at all. It would also be a very distinctive element in the language, separating it from the more typical (to most of us) Latin based letter sets.

One particular letter or pair of letters needs to be separately addressed as well, in regards to pronunciation. That's Y and J. The Japanese "Ayo" is pretty much unpronounceable in the Finnish way (well, not unpronounceable but it sounds very funny/ugly). Y is after all always a vowel sound in Finnish, so the way to write the Japanse pronunciation out in a Finnish way is to use "Ajo". My gut instinct is to say that the Caldari Y (and J) is in all cases similar to the Finnish one (it fits the words and pronounciations I've seen). Hence, btw, the english "yo" would be written as "jou" in Caldari. However, as above, I suggest that should only consist of two actual Caldari letters (since OU should be a single letter).

Just a few thoughts.