I need to find a way to create custom glyphs and ligatures for a new system of punctuation I've been working on. Is there an option readily available for private use, or do you suggest I publish graphics and invite collaborators?<p>Are there any dominant sites where people open their artistic and conceptual projects for volunteer input? Like GitHub perhaps but supporting a greater variety of media.
If you need something free/opensource, there’s not many options. When you like it old-school, you can give Knuth’s companion to TeX MetaFont¹ a try.<p>Then there’s FontForge², which is by far the most evolved, feature-heavy project, but until recently had bad UX/UI and was a pain to install and run on OSX. It seems, that’s changed, though.<p>FontLab³ still is the type design “industry”’s de facto standard font editor, but development lags behind, and it’s quite expensive for a hobby project.<p>There are a few other proprietary offerings, notably the DTL FontMaster⁴ tool suite. But Glyphs⁵ seems to be going the winner, steadily taking over market share from FontLab.<p>If you like scripting your designs (esp. in Python) you should definitely try RoboFont⁶.<p>When you’re looking for volunteers/collaborators on your project, then do check in at Typophile⁷. For over a decade, it’s the principal outlet for all things type and type design: on the fora you’ll meet some very knowledgable experts always willing to help.<p>Since you mentioned punctuation, I suppose you’re familiar already with the _Shady Characters_⁸ project (and its companion book⁹). As for a detailed history, I can highly recommend Malcolm B. Parkes† authoritative monograph on the subject, too.<p>¹ <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafont" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafont</a>
² <a href="http://fontforge.github.io" rel="nofollow">http://fontforge.github.io</a>
³ <a href="http://www.fontlab.com/font-editor/fontlab-studio" rel="nofollow">http://www.fontlab.com/font-editor/fontlab-studio</a>
⁴ <a href="http://www.fontmaster.nl" rel="nofollow">http://www.fontmaster.nl</a>
⁵ <a href="http://www.glyphsapp.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.glyphsapp.com</a>
⁶ <a href="http://doc.robofont.com" rel="nofollow">http://doc.robofont.com</a>
⁷ <a href="http://typophile.com" rel="nofollow">http://typophile.com</a>
⁸ <a href="http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk" rel="nofollow">http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk</a>
⁹ Keith Houston, Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks. W. W. Norton, 2013.
† Malcolm B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: Punctuation in the West. University of California Press, 1993.
FontForge [1] is available in most Linux distro package repositories and is very powerful for creating and editing fonts. There are Private Use Areas (PUA) in Unicode [2] where you could create custom glyphs as needed.<p>[1] <a href="https://fontforge.github.io/en-US/" rel="nofollow">https://fontforge.github.io/en-US/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas</a>
A great place to start (and it's free) is <a href="http://fontstruct.com/" rel="nofollow">http://fontstruct.com/</a>.<p>It's a grid-based system that gives you predefined shapes to build with. It's very easy to get started and you can create some really amazing fonts with it.