Christian Thalmann

It says Etéciel vanye tengwar!, which is «You have written beautiful letters!» in Quenya.

Huh, apparently you can't count on classical education anymore nowadays.

It's really hard to make Bézier curves transition smoothly from a straight stem to a curve. I often find that I can make either the curve look right or the stem part look straight, but not the other at the same time. In your /g, for instance, I suspect you tried to make the straight/round transition in the tail as gradual as possible, but as a result the tail's curve looks a bit awkward, like it's been pressed flat from the bottom right direction.

It's possible, though, if you add another set of on-curve points halfway through the curve (in the diagonal, as it were). Draw your Bézier so as to make the curve look right, add in the diagonal points, and then pull back the on-curve points at the straight/curve transition. The diagonal points will fix the other half of the curve so it doesn't get distorted by the work on the transition area.

I believe that's called tension offloading, but I'm not sure, I only read it in a forum post somewhere. Maybe ask one of the learnèd people around here to be sure.

As for your sample: The /m still strikes me as too narrow, and the arches are visibly uneven in width.

I, for one, prefer having dedicated glyph slots for differently connected forms of a letter. For instance, these are the /fehDotless-ar.medi and /fehDotless-ar.init from my Quinoa Black:


I've had to apply some trickery to the former to make it look like a circle sitting on top of a continuous baseline, when in fact the counter dips below the baseline's top and the circle is optically adjusted to avoid blotting. For the latter, of course, much of that adjustment was unnecessary or would have been counterproductive on its right side.

You can't do this sort of thing if you use the same glyph for connecting and non-connecting instances. Note that Quinoa is a geometric typeface whose Arabic has even been called «more progressive» (as in non-traditional) than its Roman. The vast majority of Arabic typefaces are going to be less geometric, more organic and thus even much less amenable to this kind of treatment than Quinoa.

Humburger: an atheist's lunch.

Actually, I find the new /M more legible than before. The /M/M is particularly nice!

I'm not so fond of the many stylistic inconsistencies e.g. within and between /A/H/I/N/T, though.