Drop Capitals

All of these letters are drawn by hand, imitating particular illuminated capitals of the Isabella Breviary. I create the black-and-white outline in FontForge, then export it as SVG and color it in with Inkscape.

Both versions of the letter are present in the font, so we get backward compatibility with browsers that don’t yet support SVG fonts. Currently, Firefox and Edge support it, as do Mobile Safari, Chrome for iOS (and probably any other iOS browser, since they all have to use the same engine), and, I've read, Safari for MacOS 10.14 Mojave.

Coloring the fonts takes a lot of work, and there are some finicky details of compatibility among the three engines that support it.

Despite that, I find it worthwhile; I think it could add a lot to the experience of using my Isabella font.

Every capital is taken from the Isabella Breviary, except the ones that just aren’t there: J, V, W, Y, and Z. Those, I’m going to have to improvise.

For the F, I wasn’t able to find a large example, so the small example I found was too simple, so I drew the vines ab initio, trying to match the complexity of the E.

Getting harder to come up with text for all of these paragraphs. I think I’m going to stop insisting on being relevant to the font.

Help! I’m trapped in a paragraph factory! Please send copies of the Riverside Shakespeare. With luck, the sight of vast amounts of plot without paragraphs will blow the owners’ minds.

Interactive fonts would be even more interesting. SVG can contain JavaScript, after all. Maybe you wouldn’t give it access to mouse events and what-not (what would that mean when printed?), but the glyphs could know their neighbors, and the background colors; you could have fonts where the glyphs adapted themselves to their context. Futuracha Pro had a demo video that showed them doing that, but the actual font doesn’t.

Jabberwock, Jabberwock, go so slow! Jabberwock, Jabberwock, go so fast! Jabberwock, Jabberwock, step on the gas!

Knights of the Round Table: Lancelot, Galahad, Tristan, Bedivere, Gawain, Kay, Percival...Arthur, of course.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.

My favorite part is adding the color. The initial black-and-white is pickier. Worse, it requires a steadier hand, and is difficult to interrupt, which means I can't really do it on the train. So I build the black-and-white outlines on the weekends, at home, with an external monitor and a trackball, and then color them on my commute.

Nor flesh, nor fowl, nor good red herring—I've never seen a red herring; I've only ever had pickled herring, which is grey, or silver, or something. I looked it up, and it turns out herring turns red when you smoke it.

Old King Cole was a merry old soul—it sounds like it refers to some old pre-Norman king, but “he called for his pipe” seems to suggest the rhyme is post-Columbus. Or maybe King Cole really enjoyed plumbing.

Planet X, the last known source of illidium phosphate, the shaving cream atom! Just beyond Planet W, Planet V, Planet U...a clear demonstration of the Well-Ordering Theorem.

Quick, come up with something to say for this paragraph! No, it has to be longer than that; it has to descend below the Q. There, that should do it.

Row, row, row Descartes gently down the stream! He will explain to you That the song Is so wrong: Life is not a dream.

Superman comes from a planet with a completely different environment (red sun, much stronger gravity), and yet it evolved a species so much like humans that he can be attracted to a human woman. This is staggeringly unlikely; he should be completely different. Even if he were superficially humanoid, he shouldn't be able to pass as human; he should have thicker bones, huge muscles (huger than he has, I mean), and bigger joints to provide leverage where the tendons attach.

To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man. — Shakespeare

Upon the shell of Great A’Tuin stand the four elephants; and upon their backs turns the Discworld, world and mirror of worlds.

Virtue is not left to stand alone. He who practices it will have neighbors. — Confucius

When tired, we are attacked by ideas we long ago conquered. — Nietzsche (not someone I normally look to, but this one rings true)

Xanthometer: a graduated scale for measuring the color of ocean or lake water, from blue to yellow (hence “xantho-”, from a Greek root meaning yellow), white, or green. Seems to be a Victorian invention.

Y is sometimes a vowel and sometimes a consonant. I think “I” and “U” must have been like that before “J” and “V” were created .

Zoom on a phone camera is usually a fake; the phone just crops the photo and enlarges it. I used to think that meant I should always stay zoomed out, and crop it later; but the counteragument is that seeing the crop while you're taking the photo lets you get the composition right.