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Kzinti.ttf VERSION 2.00 READ ME
27 April 2002
Daniel U. Thibault
D.U.Thibault@Bigfoot.com
Well, we've got fonts for nearly every major fictional
alien race out there in SF TV/Movie Land, from Babylon 5
to Star Trek by way of Star Wars.
But what of Larry Niven's Kzinti?
I have been able to find only two attempts at pictorial
representations of this "dots-and-commas" script. Neither
was very pleasing in my opinion, and neither was a font.
So I had to make one up.
The two pictures (Kzinti.gif and Kzinti Sample.gif) show
my resulting font. It looks best printed (300+ dpi) or at
large screen sizes (24+ pt).
Note that the "c" is meant to be a "ch" or "sh", and that
there are no Q, X, 8 or 9.
In Larry Niven's Known Space, we learn that the Kzinti
script evolved from claw markings in wood. This would
influence the script the same way that runes were. Runes
were also mostly graven in wood, so they had no transverse
strokes --to avoid going across the grain. So I figured
Kzinti markings would be dots (a simple peck of the claw) or
vertical scratches with a twist (commas).
This gives us a basic sub-glyph set of five symbols (the
period and the vertical and horizontal mirror images of the
comma). Not enough for a full alphabet, obviously, so letters
and other symbols must be small groupings of dots and commas.
I chose a roughly two by three matrix as my basic glyph
framework.
The numbers only go from 0 to 7, since the Kzin have an
octal (base eight) numeral system. I used the dot as a "one"
and one of the commas as a "two". Simple superpositions
supply the numbers 3 through 7. I used what should by all
logic be an 8 for the zero --I didn't want to use a blank.
The remaining symbols follow a strict convention of having
a dot at the lower left, to minimize confusion when symbols
run into each other. The other sub-glyph at the lower right
serves to regroup the symbols.
The vowels (plus H, W and Y) form one group, plosive,
sibilant and labial consonants three more (with the
appropriate correspondences being apparent when the symbols
are compared; for example, B and P only differ by the lower
right sub-glyph). The last group (which uses the double-dot
base) contains the miscellaneous symbols --punctuation,
mathematical, etc.
I originally made this font with a combination of Corel
Draw 4 and Softy 1.07b; after a four year hiatus, I revised it
thoroughly using Font Creator Program 3 and some home-made
software tools.
VERSION HISTORY
2.00 27 April 2002; Complete overhaul, added characters
1.11 07 January 2001; re-release
1.10 02 April 2000 re-release
1.04 04 August 1998; Rebuilt using Softy 1.07b
1.03 Rebuilt using Softy 1.07a
1.00 12 March 1998; Original release (Softy 1.06b)
Feedback is welcome! |