solwyvern » Fonts

Hymmnos and Fonic Symbol Fonts

solwyvern — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 16:50:19 +0000

Role-playing games often make use of symbols or writing in a completely different language, to really bring the story alive. It gives depth and adds more realism to the story envisioned by the creators. These often invite curiosity and interest, especially for one such as myself. These writings reveal a mysterious aura, and a message unknown to many.

Two such games are Ar Tonelico and Tales of The Abyss. Both games include symbolic fonts that are very much alike.

Finding Truetype Fonts for these symbols is quite rare. So it is somewhat fortunate to obtain these fonts.

The Hymmnos Language from Ar Tonelico.

Hymmnos is a language from the time before the two catastrophes that destroyed the world, and is used by Reyvateils to interface with the tower. It is represented in-game by unique glyphs. Though it used to be a universal language, its meaning has been lost through the ages and is now used only for Song Magic.

Although it is a synthetic language constructed solely for the game, it is translatable and not just pure gibberish … The basic Hymmnos grammar consists of “emotion sound(想音)-V-O-C”, and many words are taken from existing languages; mainly English, Japanese, Sanskrit and German.

The Fonic Language from the Tales of the Abyss.

Tales of the Abyss features Ancient Ispanian, in which, for instance, Yulia’s fonic hymns are written and sung. (Abyss also uses “fonic script” in some places, but that’s apparently just the alphabet that the people of Auldrant use.)
The Fonic Language, which the Fonic Script is the alphabet for, is the modern tongue in Auldrant, and pretty much just English in pretty symbols. However, as Ispania is taken to be another word for Spain, a theory exists that Ancient Ispanian is Spanish, Latin, or some Latin derived language.

Download:

Download Hymmnos and Fonic Fonts

Typechart , Web Typography CSS Reference

solwyvern — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 13:19:41 +0000

Typechart is an excellent way to check and browse web typography. It uses some of the more common web-browser fonts that are included in PC’s and Macs, and provides the css code for it. Not to mention a very fitting and elegant site design and scheme. If you ever find yourself puzzled on how to style your html text, Typechart is the way to go!

“TYPECHART lets you flip through, preview and compare web typography while retrieving the CSS.”

Visit Typechart

Japanese Fonts

solwyvern — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 10:23:11 +0000

Japanese fonts span a small scale when compared to the available library of English fonts. And the default installed Japanese typefaces that Microsoft provides, such as MSGothic and MSMincho, are barely enough for variety. Well, not surprising, as very few people really have the need for it… but for people like myself, who want to make use of Japanese fonts in their graphic work, having a wide array of Japanese fonts can be quite useful.

There are, of course, several fonts out there that try to imitate Japanese fonts, or Japanese fonts that can type with English input but these are not actual Japanese input fonts.

You can find some great Japanese fonts at Wazu Japanese Font Gallery.

Here are a few of my personal picks:

Aquafont | あくあフォント

*Aquafont is also the font I use for my logo

Azuki font | あずきフォント

Azuki Font | あずきフォント

KFhimaji | ＫＦひま字

qoocRomanKT | クークロマン・カタカナ

*This font is limited to katakana, and does not seem to follow IME text input… This font was made for the title of the Katahane game, by tarte.

In addition to these, I use a 57-set font pack -the Go Ju Nana Nihongo fonts.

Which you can be download here:

Part 1 | Part 2

As a last note,… I’ve found that it can be quite difficult to manage these fonts if you put them all at once into your font library, so install them at your own discretion!

Most of the fonts listed here are applicable to Windows,… I wish I could say the same for a MAC, though.

Instruction:
In order to use these fonts, assuming you are using Windows XP, you need to have Asian text languages and input text installed into your machine. Find out more at Microsoft.