My Fonts

As stated a level up, I tinkered some with making my own fonts, like the Visible Speech fonts in METAFONT and in TrueType. After a while I decided to try to make a font that one could actually stand to look at, and wound up making a fairly wide-coverage Unicode font family I called Marin (Origin of the name: my purpose was to make a font that didn't make the reader actively nauseated when reading it. Hence, I based the name on Marinol, which is the generic name for an anti-emetic consisting of the active compound in Marijuana, THC.) I also designed a few fonts for setting Hebrew, some of which I have the audacity to try to sell at MyFonts.com.

One of them, Gill Hebrew was actually designed by Eric Gill, one of the greatest type-designers of the twentieth century. He's known for such fonts as Gill Sans and Perpetua (among other things), and apparently he spent the last few years of his life in Jerusalem, where he became fascinated with the Hebrew alphabet and issues involved in setting it. He designed his own Hebrew font, which was apparently not very well-received, since he added serifs and things to the Hebrew letters that were alien to what people were used to. I've seen pictures of it here and there, on the web and in books, but I could never find any digitized version of it... so I decided to make one. It takes some getting used to, but it really is a usable font. I just wish it would see more use.

The Itonai font is actually a Hebrew font made from elements of Times New Roman. Basically I took one of the most common Latin fonts, chopped it up into pieces, and re-assembled those pieces to be Hebrew letters! (redrawing the whole thing myself, of course, so as not to be plagiarizing the original font) It certainly is jarring, but quite readable. I used to think it was the ugliest Hebrew font in the world, but it was topped by Hugh J. Schonfield's proposed new Hebrew script. Wow, that's a tough one to look at. But pretty interesting, too.

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