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Tsukurimashou 0.1

This is the announcement of a now-obsolete version. Check out the latest progress of Tsukurimashou at sourceforge.jp!

日本語のページは読んで下さい。

I'm pleased to announce the first release of the Tsukurimashou font family. The user's manual and demo is available as a PDF file; so is the complete package in bzipped TAR and ZIP formats. Precompiled OpenType fonts, compatible with all currently-popular typesetting systems, are included in those packages for two styles (Tsukurimashou Kaku and Mincho). Other styles you'll have to compile yourself.

These fonts are released with source code under the GNU GPL version 3 with font-embedding clarification. The current version contains the full repertoire of ISO Latin-1, hiragana, and katakana; more characters are on the way.

5 comments

Way to go! I enjoyed demo.pdf and will return to it - a nice introduction to Japanese typography. I like the Japanese fonts even though I have no right to any opinion. But why is the Umlaut associated with heavy metal? And how does one say "Mötley Crüe"? I would tend to pronounce it (using French spelling, because there are no equivalent English sounds), "meutlé cru-e". Becase if it's just pronouned "motley crew", well... then using the Umlaut is pretty silly. Axel - 2011-02-19 23:30

Wikipedia and TV Tropes have informative articles on the subject. Heavy metal music has often tied itself to a real or imagined Northern European and specifically German cultural milieu. You see a lot of blackletter on album covers, and the gratuitous umlauts go hand-in-hand with that. Usually the names are pronounced just as if the dots weren't present at all, and it is pretty silly, but these days it's almost always at least partly tongue-in-cheek. The "Heavy Metal Umlaut" in Tsukurimashou is actually a substitution feature - with it turned on, the round dots of regular dieresis glyphs get replaced by slightly larger diamond-shaped ones. Matt - 2011-02-19 23:55

Hmm. The machine seems to have filtered out my links. I just upgraded PivotX and wonder if that's a new "feature" or if I merely forgot that's how I had it set up. Anyway, they were http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_umlaut and http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HeavyMetalUmlaut . Matt - 2011-02-19 23:58

So filtering out links is something that people actually think of? It's only happened to me in YouTube comments, to my extreme annoyance. Axel - 2011-02-20 08:27

I just registered for an account on Typophile so I could bring this to the attention of the people there. I'm certainly told it's a good community, but WOW is their Web design a disaster. Scroll bars that don't look like scroll bars, buttons activated by hovering the mouse pointer over them...

On the link filtering, I looked at the backups and think it was always like that. I note that it *is* explained in the small print below the comment form. But if multiple participants really want to be able to say A HREF, I may look into changing that. Matt - 2011-02-20 12:07