Caeciliae source files now publicly available
  • Fr. Matthew Spencer
    Posts: 100

    The files used for creation of Caeciliae are now available at the sourceforge project page. These are not the font files for general use, but the files used in the creation of Caeciliae.



    Some basic notes



    • The font files themselves have always been open source under the SIL Open Font License, which permits derivative forks anyway; hopefully releasing the source files though might inspire some to contribute their great ideas and creativity back into the project itself.
    • If you are proficient in tinkering around with FontForge or with creating font glyphs, please feel free to play around.


    Some advanced notes for potential contributors



    • Caeciliae was created using FontForge under Linux and cygwin/Windows. It is composed simply of one source file and a simple FontForge script file for generating the glyphs and the variant font files. It couldn't be much simpler, though the daunting part might be the number of glyphs and ligature bindings which Caeciliae uses for easier key entering.
    • A common requested feature is to make a variant of Caeciliae with thicker staff lines so that it photocopies well. I'm happy to help walk through the process of creating this variant one on one with someone who is comfortable diving in to the project. This might prove to be a useful way of getting to learn how the font source files are organized and created. Let me know: matthew@osjoseph.org.
    • I have some technical notes about what is still lacking (and why Caeciliae has not hit a 1.0 release yet), which eventually can be incorporated in the sourceforge project page.


    In Christ, -Fr. Matthew, osj

  • bgeorge77
    Posts: 190
    EXCELLENT.

    I would like to use this thread as a repository for ideas for the font.

    1. Add a "thicklines" version of the font for those with the ramshackle parish xerox machine.

    2. Add a thick horizonal bar character of the type that you might see often in psalm settings to mark the recitation tone.

    More ideas?
  • bgeorge77
    Posts: 190
    Uh... Fr, the file on SourceForge IS a zip of the final-product TTF files... Perhaps you uploaded the wrong zip archive? Or am I just confused?
  • Fr. Matthew Spencer
    Posts: 100
    bgeorge77,

    Sorry for the delay in responding.

    On sourceforge, the files section is used for releases, in this case, the latest files for users of Caeciliae rather than the developers.

    To access the developer files is usually done with software for source control--caeciliae uses a program called bazaar. From sourceforge, they usually have a way to simply look through these files using your web browser, but unfortunately it is not working right now. (I'm following the issue here.)

    If you're not comfortable using source control software like bazaar, subversion, cvs, or others, you can probably just hang tight until sourceforge.net fixes their site (they say they were supposed to have it fixed today, but we'll see...), at which point you should be able to see the files at http://caeciliae.bzr.sourceforge.net/bzr/caeciliae/.
  • Fr. Matthew Spencer
    Posts: 100
    For those interested in playing around with Caeciliae in FontForge, the development files are now easily accessible at http://caeciliae.bzr.sourceforge.net/bzr/caeciliae/files.
  • bgeorge77
    Posts: 190
    Ah! Thank you, I will check them out!
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