Background Information
The original description of these fonts, borrowed from the Impalari repo, is:
The Libre Caslon fonts are unique Caslons. They are different to all other Caslons out there.
When we were faced with the challenge of making a new Caslon, we asked ourselves: How can we make them different, to bring something new to the table?
We realized that most Caslon revivals were based on 18-Century specimens and that there was a whole genre of Caslons that has been so far ignored: The alluring hand-lettered American Caslons of 1960s.
This was a captivating subject to investigate. Caslon was the very first alphabet that lettering artists learned to draw, so they all were very familiar with it. Our wonder led us to find countless examples of beautifully crafted and elegant vintage ads and hand lettering books. Among those many books, there were two that outshine the rest: One is "Lettering for Advertising" by Mortimer Leach, and the other one is "How to Render Roman Letter Forms" by Tommy Thompson. Both of these books are excellent, highly recommended for all those who want to learn lettering.
So, instead of making just another revival of the types of William Caslon, we preferred to pay homage to 60's lettering artist's Caslon interpretations. And that's how Libre Caslon become different to all other Caslons. (Not better or worse, just different).
We also decided to make two size-specific subfamilies:
- Libre Caslon Display, a high-contrast Caslon for big headlines.
- Libre Caslon Text, specifically optimized for web body text.
Libre Caslon Text also include some nice, extra Open Type features:
- 17 ligatures on the regular styles, and 20 ligatures on the italic styles
- Lining Proportional Numbers (Default style).
- Lining Tabular Numbers and punctuation.
- Old Style Proportional Numbers.
- Inferiors, Superiors, Numerators, Denominators.
- Fractions.
- Ordinals.
- The italic style includes an alternate Ampersand (ss01)
- Libre Caslon is licensed under the SIL Open Font License v1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
- To view the copyright and specific terms and conditions please refer to OFL.txt
The Libre Caslon Fonts covers all 104 Latin Languages: Afar, Afrikaans, Albanian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Belarusian, Bislama, Bosnian, Breton, Catalan, Chamorro, Chichewa, Comorian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino/Tagalog, Finnish, Flemish, French, Gaelic (Irish / Manx / Scottish), Gagauz, German, Gikuyu, Gilbertese/Kiribati, Greenlandic, Guarani, Haitian_Creole, Hawaiian, Hungarian, Icelandic, Igo/Igbo, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Javanese, Kashubian, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luba/Ciluba/Kasai, Luxembourgish, Malagasy, Malay, Maltese, Maori, Marquesan, Marshallese, Moldovan/Moldovian/Romanian, Montenegrin, Nauruan, Ndebele, Norwegian, Oromo, Palauan/Belauan, Polish, Portuguese, Quechua, Romanian, Romansh, Sami, Samoan, Sango, Serbian, Sesotho, Setswana/Sitswana/Tswana, Seychellois_Creole, SiSwati/Swati/Swazi, Silesian, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Sorbian, Sotho, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tahitian, Tetum, Tok_Pisin, Tongan, Tsonga, Tswana, Tuareg/Berber, Turkish, Turkmen, Tuvaluan, Uzbek/Usbek, Wallisian, Walloon, Welsh, Xhosa, Yoruba, Zulu.
This project was unchanged for some time, and Stephen Nixon was later contracted to master it as a Variable Font.
Impallari's website is no longer available at its normal domain, but it can be seen in its most recent active form via Archive.org's Wayback Machine: [Libre Caslon Display and Text, Impallari.com, 26 Dec 2017](https://web.archive.org/web/20171226183904/http://www.impallari.com:80/projects/overview/libre-caslon-dis
Variable font upgrade notes
Notes were taken throughout the variable font upgrade project and added to the docs directory. I tend to take notes while working anyway, in order to think through problems and record solutions for later reference. In this project, I have included these in the repo so that others might find references to solve similar problems, especially because variable font-making processes are relatively new, and there is a general scarcity of online knowledge on font mastering. Because they were often made alongside work, the notes can at times be a bit disjointed. Hopefully they are still helpful to others!
If you have any questions about the project or the notes, feel free to file an issue or to reach out to Stephen Nixon via Twitter (@thundernixon) or other social media (typically also @thundernixon).
Build Instructions
The sources can be built with FontMake, but I've put together some specific build scripts to pass the fonts through some steps that fix metadata issues.
The build process requires you to open up a terminal and navigate to this project's directory.
NOTE: the build scripts are written to be run on macOS. If you are building on another platform, they may require some adjustment.
I suggest using a Python virtual environment to build this project. If you've never set up a virtual environment before, it's worthwhile because it will save you time in the future. Read more about virtual environments in this guide.
First, set up a virtual environment with:
python3 -m venv venv
Here, venv will be the name of the virtual environment and of the folder holding its dependencies. You need to activate it with:
source venv/bin/activate
To operate the scripts within this repo, install requirements by pointing pip to the requirements.txt file:
pip install -r requirements.txt
(If you wish to use similar dependencies on another project, you can just copy the same requirements.txt file.)
To exit out of the virtual environment, you can use the command deactivate, or simply close out of that terminal session (just remember to start it up again when you come back).
The first time you run the build, you will need to give run permissions to the build scripts.
On the command line, navigate to the project folder (cd Encode-Sans), and then give permissions to the shell scripts with:
chmod -R +x sources
The -R applies your permission to each of the shell scripts in the directory, and the +x adds execute permissions. Before you do this for shell scripts, you should probably take a look through their contents, to be sure they aren't doing anything bad. The ones in this repo simply build from the GlyphsApp sources and apply various fixes to the results.
You can then build sources by running shell scripts in sources/scripts/.
Build the variable & static fonts by running the following command while at the root of the directory:
sources/build.sh
