[Forum feature request] Runic fonts

Discussion in 'Archived Topics' started by Net, Apr 20, 2014.

?

Would you like additional runic font(s) on the forums?

  1. Yes.

    13 vote(s)
    61.9%
  2. No.

    4 vote(s)
    19.0%
  3. I do not care.

    4 vote(s)
    19.0%
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  1. Net

    Net Avatar

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    I am sorry if there is another thread about this and I missed it.

    Currently we can select few fonts to use in our posts: Andale Mono, Arial, Arial Black, Book Antiqua, Courier New, Georgia, Helvetica, Impact, Tahoma, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS or Verdana.

    It is cool, but I would really love to see some runic font in the mix, I think that it would be great addition especially for the roleplaying forum and it would help us to learn to read runic texts.

    So, I am curious what others think about this idea. Would you like to see runes on the forums? Are you afraid that half of the topics would be written in runes?
     
  2. Lord Baldrith

    Lord Baldrith Avatar

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    Bring on the fonts! I love fonts.
     
  3. Sir Bradley White

    Sir Bradley White Avatar

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    Well, as long as people use it wisely I would be fine with it. If I start seeing post after post of it it would annoy me. Would also probably drive off new backers if they see it constantly. I mean, if they stop by just to grab info, and all they see are runic posts, why would they ever stop back again?

    Keep it in a separate place, like a RP section or something, and I wouldn't really mind. Heck, might use it myself to make myself learn it. :D
     
  4. Lord Baldrith

    Lord Baldrith Avatar

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    Agreed...Tho, I do need to brush up on my Runic game font as days of old have left me when I knew the Ultima font by heart.
     
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  5. selbie

    selbie Avatar

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    A font toggle for the forums could be one idea? Portalarium could implement a <runic> tag that shows the text in runic, but if people want to read it normally, they just click a 'reveal' button and the text jumps back to normal.

    EDIT: on a side note, are there runic characters for numbers? or are they just 1, 2, 3 etc.?
    Seems a bit inconsistent if they are not also designed in the same system.
     
  6. Net

    Net Avatar

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    I do not think there are, it would be great if there were but I do not think that runic texts go well with arabic numerals(1234567890), I would expect Roman Numerals (MDCLXVI), those look like runes anyway. However it is complicated to do complex math with them, hardly anyone can use fractions perperly and so on. I think that sometimes runes were used as numbers and in some modern usage there was even base ten system, so I suppose we could use these runes to replace arabic numerals.

    PS: ᚱᚢᚾᛁᚳ᛫ᚫᛚᛈᚻᚫᛒᛖᛏ (just playing with unicode; I need runic keyboard, lol).
     
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  7. Time Lord

    Time Lord Avatar

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    I say I like this :)

    I've always enjoyed being an early player of Ultima Prime, because it educated me in the use of Gargish, which carried over into my immersion RP in UO.
    I don't look forward to learning how to use another language. Other languages were always difficult for me to learn, yet it adds to my ingame immersion and that is never a bad thing :D
    I'm currently learning the Thai language in school and I find that it is difficult for me to learn new languages at my late age. But, I am gaining immersion into a real country's people and customs... and that's never a bad thing ether ;)

    Education Should Never End,
    or all you're doing is breathing useless air, spiting out old information, that has all been said before o_O
    ~Time Lord~:rolleyes:
     
  8. Net

    Net Avatar

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    Just one more thing, I suppose that SotA runes are based on Anglosaxon runes.
    I do not know if 'special' runes for two (or three) letters (e.g. ᚦ - th, ᛝ - ing, ᛠ - ea, ᛡ - ia, ᛥ - st...) are included. It would be cool if they are, because then runic alphabet would be more than a simple one letter substitution, but then again it would be harder to use them properly without runic keyboard and I doubt that forum software would easily allowed to convert 'th' to a single letter). On the other hand runes do not need upper and lower case and some letters are missing (q, w), so with a bit of prictice we could use them properly (e.g. 't' would be ᛏ, t; 'T' would be ᚦ, th).
     
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  9. selbie

    selbie Avatar

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    Or Duodecimal :D

    I like it, but I've been thinking that adding more stroke-style symbols to the system will just start to confuse the difference between numbers and letters.

    Perhaps they could be dots either side of a horizontal or vertical line counting from 0 to 9, then they just get stacked to be read sequentially (ie. 1594) rather than, say roman numerals which are a two-step process to interpret.
     
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  10. selbie

    selbie Avatar

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    [​IMG]

    Worked out a rough idea of what I was saying. :)
    I found that vertical allows the characters to be grouped closely together instead of horizontal lines which space it out too much.
     
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  11. Time Lord

    Time Lord Avatar

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    Come on Everybody,

    "It's Time to Have a Runic Sing Along!" :D



    ~Time Lord~:)
     
  12. selbie

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    I had never thought of that! As a fan of geometry I like that a lot (all mysticism aside)

    I'm sure the more demonic crowd would follow a reverse pentagram structure :D
     
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  13. Duke Gréagóir

    Duke Gréagóir Legend of the Hearth

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    I like the idea, on mobile devices runic shows up as ? Question marks.
     
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  14. selbie

    selbie Avatar

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    I've been getting it too. It turns out it's a special set of unicode fonts you need to download, but I'm not sure if that is supported on phones.

    Junicode
     
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  15. Time Lord

    Time Lord Avatar

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    Yes My Friend selbie :)

    I myself am a very big fan of geometry of old as well as the new fractal geometry. As for the demonic crowd, most all such nonsense came out of those that wished to fool others into believing that science was magic and belonged to some evil forces to be feared. It all came from the necessity of knowing the time and navigation. Yet when we first began timing things, the first things were the traveling's of the planets against the curtain of the greater cosmos. Then by using these, early man then then began timing everything of biological happenings. Thus leaving those that did not understand the timing, began looking at the ones who did as magical people of great power. The geometric design in geometry here, is one of the grand and oldest of the designs that came from watching the sky. Then there are others such as the pentagram that also came from watching the skies (transits of Venus). Then there came letters that were also patterned after those same geometric designs that came from watching the big world wrist watch in the sky. Many of the world language's letters came from such patterns.

    But always it were those jealous and wanting of power, that kept such knowledge to themselves (because it was and is very profitable) and used their education to promote the control of those around them.
    Runic are but letters, as stars are but timers...:) yet the beauty of geometry binds them all :)
    Music is also linked to these same geometric designs of the stars through the mathematics of harmony...
    Geometry, a very magical thing... "not"... but it looks good ;)
    ~Time Lord~:rolleyes:
     
  16. selbie

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    Agreed. It's all just good "headology" :p


    Just wondering how you are able to see those fonts Net? Chrome just renders empty squares for me :/
    Edit: Firefox seems to work ok but silly Chrome doesn't. I wonder if that is the browser or the forum?
     
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  17. Net

    Net Avatar

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    Well, I use Firefox as my default browser, I have troubles with some other unicode charaters , runes work fine though.

    Anyway what I wanted them to do was introduction of special runic font to the website, however with phones using their own fonts (or ability to copy paste them to word and change font) it would be rather easy to decode them.

    I do not think it would be a problem, but now I would hope that the runic font would convert not only basic English alphabet to SotA runes, but also Unicode runes to SotA runes, so we could make translation harder if we wanted to:) And even people withou font displaying unicode runes could see them with custom SotA font.
     
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  18. Sir Frank

    Sir Frank Master of the Mint

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    So...As we all know, Dame Lori created a font of the New Britannia runes.
    I also did some dabbling with creating fonts.
    Covering all of the possible letters, numbers, and symbols is quite an undertaking.
    You basically create individual pictures for each symbol.

    Here's a shot of my FontCreator.
    [​IMG]

    If you just do letters, you've got to make 26 pictures.
    If you make upper and lower case the same, you can just double up.
    If you start to include Unicode, you are talking hundreds of possible individual pictures that have to be made and imported.
    Apparently, my limit is just north of 6400.

    Then there's kerning, or making the letters fit together in a pleasing manner. There's serious Scotch involved in that process.

    If you consider the labor involved, it isn't likely that Portalarium will make the effort to go beyond letters, numbers, and a few punctuation marks.
    However, if the crowd wanted to tackle this, maybe it would not be so bad.

    I'd volunteer to take submissions for sets of characters, and compile them into a font.
     
  19. Net

    Net Avatar

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    I am still unsure whether SOTA runes are really Anglosaxon runes, I think they decided to simply replace English alphabet with runic characters. (I would prefer anglo-saxon runes, because things are more complicated that wate with double letters runes).

    Anyway we are talking about 26 letters (or 35 runes) and 10 digits (or more or less if SotA will not use base 10 math which would be really cool, I would prefer base 8) and some other charcters. I do not think that runic texts should have upper case and lower case, so I think that ASCII printable characters should be more than enough. It should be 69 (alphabet) 78 (futhorc) characters if my math is right.

    Now I would prefer to copy those 26 (35) runic characters to unicode position of runes to prevent easy translation of the text. I would like Bold, Italic, Bold Italic variants though.

    Quite common is to use single or double line to highlight runes.
    [​IMG]

    And yes, if we were about to use two or three fonts (e.g. old runes, modern runes, magic runes), the numbers grow quickly.

    Here is simple example of anglo-saxon runic font. Small letters are used as they should, upper case letters are used for 'special' runes. Numbers are lame though and there are missing special characters. Also space should create a dot between words. I am pretty sure that the community could help with those fonts, but SotA developers should provide some starting point.


    Honestly, I do not think they should do more than that. As I said I think they should do that and then let community do extra fonts and include best of them, I know that some people alredy did fonts for SotA.

    My point was that in addition to letters, numbers, and a few punctuation marks (i.e. ASCII or Basic Latin) they should also copy letter runes to runic block of Unicode.
     
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  20. mahjah

    mahjah Avatar

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    Perhaps this vigesimal counting system would appeal? Kinda runic look. From my maternal side of family... Inupiaq.
    [​IMG]
     
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