Last Word on Fonts - for a Bit - maybe...

Well, I'm back using Firefox this morning, because Blogger and Internet Explorer aren't playing nicely together again - ho hum.

I had a couple of emails about the bastardised font I produced for the Spanish flag in the previous post (my email contact address is back in my Blogger profile - if you can get that to display properly...) - so here it is - just in graphic form - to download if it's any use to you.

The original font is TrueType JSL Antique, and I have mucked about with it (to use a technical term) in PaintShop to make the characters more like those in the flag. Individual pieces of text can be produced for a flag just by copying and pasting, and resizing as necessary, and any slight unevenness in the layout is all to the good.

I am quite pleased with the result, though probably more pleased with demonstrating that this is a good, flexible approach - if crude - which will work with any suitable donor font I can find. The alphabet here includes a few letters which may not have been in use in 18th-19th Century Spanish, and I have not amended any letters I did not find in the flag.

I have squashed the O, P and R a bit, given the S the odd slant required, shortened the middle horizontal stroke in the E and F, shortened the riser in the G, produced a nice quirky(!) Q by reversing the P, added the dot over the I, substituted the Latin V for U, and maybe one or two other tweaks I can't remember. Bear in mind this character set is intended for a rather rough battle flag for an irregular Spanish nationalist (i.e. anti-Bonaparte) unit around 1809, and may or may not be suitable for anything else! The reversed version of the N appears on the flag - maybe a bit of artistic licence?

I'll be working on flags for more of my 20mm guerrilleros, so some images may well appear here before too long. I think that is probably more than enough about that for the time being!

A Little More on Fonts

I really haven't got much further, but here's a sample of what I've been doing today. I've attempted to produce an approximate simulation of some of the text in the flag shown in the photo (which seems to belong to the 4th battalion of the Guards of Spain(?) - seems a very informal flag for such a formal sounding unit..).

My first line below the photo is simply added using a standard downloaded TrueType font, JSL Antique - exactly as the characters come. I also printed out a complete alphabet on a very large PaintShop 'canvas', and manually edited certain letters in the alphabet to make them more like the flag. The edited alphabet thus exists at present only in a graphical form on a very large jpeg file. I produced the second line of text simply by copying and pasting individual letters from my edited alphabet - this is childishly crude, but in fact doesn't take long to do, and has an unexpected advantage in that the manual placement of the letters gives a pleasing additional touch of shabbiness - makes it look less like a machine font (I think).

Next steps? - no idea - I suppose I might be able to create a new TrueType font based on my edited version of JSL Antique, or it may be that what I have done here is versatile enough and sufficiently useful to provide all I need without going to the trouble of producing actual fonts - I'll still require a variety of starting fonts, but I have a few of those now, and it's not bad for 5 minutes work, is it?

The laugh, of course, is that in 20mm scale you can hardly see the text anyway...

Hmmm.

Fonts for Flags

This is a plea for a bit of help - it's not a critical matter, by any means, but it is possible that someone who is interested in printing military flags may have some useful suggestions.

As one of the sideshows of my wargaming, I enjoy researching, designing (or "laying out") flags with PaintShop and printing them up in the correct size for issue to the 20mm troops. In an ideal world, I would like to be able to hand paint my flags, but I don't have the skill and the results would disappoint me, so I print them on the posh graphic printer, using posh photographic paper. Works fine, and if they fade I can always re-print them.

Recently I've been looking to produce some more examples of convincing-looking flags for Spanish irregular units in the Guerra de Independencia (Peninsular War). Of course they are going to be fakes - no-one has an exact idea what most of these flags looked like, so my aim is to produce something which looks fairly convincing, and is generic enough to allow the unit to change its identity to suit the scenario!

Here are three reproductions (not mine) of some real flags. I am interested in the style of the lettering - the guys that made up these flags were not necessarily sloppy or lacking in taste - they wanted their flags to look good, and the lettering presumably looks like what lettering was supposed to look like on such flags. In other words, what you see here was to some extent constrained by lack of money or time, but it represents a contemporary style.

I've spent a couple of interesting evenings searching for antique fonts on the internet (and that's free fonts, boys and girls), and I've found a lot of interesting stuff, but I find that it is very hard to get graphic designers or font specialists to stray far away from the Germanic "Olde English" lettering I used to see on marmalade labels, and in general their products are far too slick and far too marketing-oriented for my purposes. I understand that no-one is likely to make a TrueType font as crude as some of these, but any kind of unsanitised 18th-19th century lettering would be refreshing.

This is maybe a long shot, but has anyone got any ideas for sources for the kind of historic fonts I'm talking about?