How to easily change the orientation of your writing

Since I found a way to create fonts for my fictional writing systems, I've been busy the past few weeks getting them done. Along the way, I've learned a few things. Most fictional alphabets are written left to right, because that's how it's done in the Western world. There are other ways of writing around the world, including right to left, and top to bottom, which usually is read from right to left. There is at least one writing system that switched between being read left to right and right to left--the direction switched every line. There are also rare occurrences of natural writing that proceeds from top to bottom and reading left to right, but so few that word processing programs are not set up to handle them with just a few clicks of the mouse. There is also no good way to make the word processors I work with write right to left without making a lot of changes to your computer, including an OS change to a language that requires one to write right to left, i.e. Hebrew. However, I found a way to force your word processor to write top to bottom with the lines moving from left to right, and I also figured out which programs to use and what to do to write right to left without changing your OS language to Hebrew or another language written right to left.

To write top to bottom and left to right, you first need a custom font because all your letters must be the same width. I was designing a vertical cursive font, so I automatically made all my letters the same width and kept track of the alignment of each because they needed to seamlessly run from one letter into the next. Next, you need Open Office Org's writer to create the document you will use. More recent versions of MS Word may work correctly now, but the version I'm required to use for work, while it says it can handle up to 45 columns on a page, will not allow me to create a page with that many columns on it! However, using OOO's writer you can create a document for Word that has that many columns on it, and Word can open and use it. I chose numerous narrow columns, because my goal was to make each column narrow enough that it forced the word processor to display a single character per line before moving down to the next line. Since columns are ordered left to right, this resulted in a document that writes from top to bottom and left to right. OOO will allow you to save your document in Word's format, so you can open and use it in Word.

My next challenge was to write from right to left without doing an OS language change. I found that simply activating Asian language support in OOO didn't work, for while it allowed me to specify writing right to left, it actually displayed the words from left to right and only moved everything from beginning each line at the left side of the page to the right.

However, I have experience with numerous other programs, including drawing programs that allow you to create what's called a text box. Since a text box is a drawing object, it can be manipulated to face any direction you want, and that coupled with another custom font provided my solution. First, you need to create a font with all the letters facing backwards. This is so your letters will face the correct direction so you can read them properly when the image is reversed. Once that's done, you can use either Windows Paint or OOO's drawing feature to write your message. In Paint, create a text box. Switch to your backwards facing font and write what you want to say in the correct order--if you want to say "correct", you will type "correct" and not "tcerroc". It will display every letter backwards because it's writing from left to right. Once your text is done being written, BEFORE YOU EXIT YOUR TEXT BOX, go to your Home tab, and to the left of your tools you will see orientation controls. Choose Rotate, and Flip Horizontal. Your text box will reverse itself, and since you used your backwards facing font, all your letters will now be facing the right direction, all without doing a global language change on your computer. To do the same thing in OOO's drawing, you will create your text box, write what you want it to say using your backwards facing font, and exit the text box. Select the text box (if it's the only thing on the page, press CTRL and A to select all), then find Modify on the top menu. Go to Convert, and convert your text box to a bitmap. Go to Modify on the top menu again, and choose Flip, Flip Horizontal, and your text box will reverse. In either program, if you are writing in several different fonts and orientations, you will create a separate text box for each.

Creating a true type font for your fictional writing system

You've put a lot of time and effort into your universe, and now are concentrating on the finer details, like providing a font for the writing system your characters use. Fans eat this stuff up, so for me, it was a must have.

There are a number of free and paid programs out there that can help you do it. The fastest way is to find a free "handwriting" font site, print their template, fill in your letters, numbers, and other symbols, and upload it. However, the downfall of using a free website is that while you end up with a useable font, any problems with the scan can end up showing in your letters, and your letters will be irregular in size, shape, and spacing. I found this out when using Paintfont.com. I also had a problem with uploading. My printed page wasn't dark enough, so I had to use my image handling software to darken the picture so that Paintfont could read it. I also tried the free online site Fontstruct.com. It has a simple grid based design platform you use in your browser, and while it has a number of different shapes and allows you to adjust the spacing of your font, it can be challenging to use to make a rounded font. I did design a font using Fontstruct.com, which for a free website gave me quite satisfying results. I then looked at free and paid font programs. I'm not a total computer geek, but I have studied computer science, and I don't find most font programs to be user friendly. I found the price on FontCreator had gone up considerably, and therefore tried two free programs, FontForge, and Birdfont. FontForge is no longer being updated, and it didn't work properly on my computer, though I had the most recent release that was supposed to work with my version of Windows. I then looked at Birdfont, which has very little documentation in English so far (it's a newer program and says on the web page that is seeking help translating to different languages, including English), and the tutorials I saw didn't show the info I needed.

Since I really wanted to program a cursive font, I realized I needed to use a free website that would convert my handwritten images into a font and after that a font program to modify it. I used Birdfont to modify the handwritten font so that it looked more cursive. All the tools in Birdfont are labeled, but instructions on how to perform simple actions are sparse as of my writing this. Here's what I figured out through trial and error: The first thing you need to do is save your file under a different name, so if you screw up, the original scanned font file is available for you to try again. You should hit save after every letter is edited, so if you mess up, you don't have to redo a lot of your work. You can move the baseline and top line around the letter, but you can't save the moves (bug report sent on this). To move your letter onto the bottom line, you need to use menu commands. First, you need to see what you're doing. On the right hand side are a bunch of buttons. About two thirds of the way down on the right, you'll see an F. Directly above that is a button that when highlighted says "show grid". Click on it. You should now see a grid in addition to the basic top, bottom, and side margin lines. Under Tools, select Move, then under Edit choose Select All. Once the entire letter is selected, you need to use the arrow keys to move the letter around. You can't go diagonally (unless you use the mouse, but I found moving letters with the mouse gave me unsatisfactory results) but I found movements with the arrow controls fine enough that I could move the letters around where I wanted them. You can adjust the width on both sides of the letters and save that, which is important because a cursive font needs its letters to be right against each other with no space between them. To get rid of unwanted marks generated by the scan, you need to left click on them, and when they are highlighted, press the delete button. Note that if there is a mark in an open area on the letter that it sits behind the open spot, trying to click on it to delete it won't work, and since I didn't want to move the letter and open space independently so that they weren't centered on each other to get to those tiny marks, and the marks aren't visible in the font at font size, I left those in place. If the mark is close to the letter, you also need to be careful--if the entire letter gets highlighted when trying to select a small mark to delete, you can accidentally delete the entire letter, and you can only use undo ONE time to change an edit and the letter back. All is not lost if you've been working carefully and saving regularly, so if you screw up and can't undo your changes, you need to exit the program without saving and restart it to bring your letter back. If your letters are too small and you want to resize them, on the upper right of the screen is a button that reads "resize and rotate paths". If you click on that button and then on your letter, an arrow will appear, and if you left click and hold down on the button and move it away from your letter it will enlarge, but it will NOT enlarge the entire letter--any open spaces in your letters, cursive or print, are considered separate pieces, and if not selected before you click on the arrow, they will stay the same size. To enlarge an entire letter, you need to click the "resize and rotate paths" button, click on the letter, then go to the menu on the top left, and under Edit, click Select All. A second arrow should appear in the middle of the letter. Once it is showing, put your mouse's pointer over the first arrow that appeared and drag it up and to the right to enlarge your letter. If your letter is too large, drag it towards the letter to make it smaller. Once all your editing is done, if you're not sure if you got all of the extra marks deleted, look on the right hand side, and about two thirds of the way down is an F. When highlighted, it says "show full glyph". Clicking on this will make the entire letter show up in your view. If there are any marks that got scanned in that didn't show up in the view when you displayed the letter to edit, they will now, and you can delete them. Once your font is edited to your satisfaction, go to the menu on the top left, hit File, and click on Name And Description. In the window that pops up, rename your font to the same as the saved file's name so that when it's exported in its edited form you can easily find it. Save that change, and then in the same menu area, under File, hit export. Find your new font and install it on your computer. Note that while I can use the true type fonts generated online with any program on my system, those edited with Birdfont only work in newer programs--so my cursive font doesn't work with my older version of Word (bug report sent on this as well). However, I only use Word to work, which is why I haven't upgraded my version, so it's an acceptable loss to me, and hopefully one that will be fixed in future versions of Birdfont.

See a screen shot of my fonts in use below.