I've been trying to make better shapes for /O and /o and such, examining released fonts. I'd always just drawn a circle or ellipse, perfectly symmetrical left/right and top/bottom, and used that as a basis. Yet when I open up various forms of Palatino or pretty much everything with an angular stress, I see that it's more of a radial symmetry -- centering things at (0,0) never gives me an on-curve node at 0 (x or y), giving instead a more or less mirrored offset. The top point is always to the right of the bottom point, and the rightmost point is always higher than the leftmost. Here, I mean the
outer curve, not the inner.
Looked like a pen tracing an ellipse. To test this, I drew circles in FontForge and expanded the strokes with a
calligraphic pen, and always got the same consistent results -- exactly what I'd seen in the few fonts I have available to test.
I think I've been doing the wrong thing for years, and no wonder why my /O shapes are so bad -- highly symmetrical, yet simultaneously pointy and lumpy.
Anyway, the point of this n00bish missive is to ask if this is indeed best practice or at least normal (again, for the outer curves of angularly-stressed faces).
Comments
I'd practise calligraphy, it helps figuring things like this out globally.
Anyway, how does one get these shapes? Scans? Stroke expansion followed by fairly heavy simplification? Just nudging points on ellipses? The shape clearly derives from simplifying a broadnib, so that's probably the best path to follow. (Pun unintended, but appreciated.)
Simply broadnibbing gives this result.