Yesterday, I received a strange e-mail to my typeoff.de address from someone named Jason. The sender’s email address was so long and cryptic that I assumed it was just another piece of spam. However, the subject matter of the e-mail was somewhat topical. Here is what Jason had to say:
You have a very tiny font site layout. Ouch, my eyes!
Will you consider cheering up the place with some font creating tutorials for the average guy? Those people with some graphics skills who use the free software like gimp and inkscape who could possibly squeeze low end highlogic or fontlab software into an annual budget to turn out fonts under GPL or similar… but more likely fight the good fight against FontForge
As far as I can deduce, Jason is either a spambot whose message seems to have hit someone who knows what fonts are, or Jason is a TypeOff. reader with a request! I really can’t tell. To Jason’s credit, there was no link in his e-mail. So if he is a spammer, he is not of the malicious variety.
For the record, I find the content here on TypeOff.de to quite cheery. I do have several articles in the pipeline, but font-making tutorials are not currently on the horizon. I find tutorials to be very difficult to write, and I prefer to blog about other topics. However, if Jason happens to live in the UK, he may be pleased to learn that I recently wrote a short FontLab tutorial for Computer Arts Projects [“Create a text font in FontLab.” Computer Arts Projects, issue 137. Bath, UK (June 2010). Link to the issue’s table of contents online]. While I did not mention FontForge in the text, most of the points touched on in the article are applicable to any piece of font creation software.