DungeonMorph Font Sample Now Available

I’ve finished a sample font file of DungeonMorphs.  This covers two dice’s designs, including rotating them 90, 180, and 270 degrees; flipping them; and rotating and flipping.  So each design has 8 permutations. 2 dice x 6 sided x 8 permutations = 96 designs.

The file below is a symbol TTF font.  I’m not an expert in fonts, but roughly that means that the characters are not stored in the address space reserved for letters, but operating systems are supposed to recognize that it is a symbol font and when you type a letter you get a design.

The final DungeonMorph fonts will likely differ from the way this sample is set up.  Where this covers all permutations of 2 dice, I plan to make the final fonts each cover all 90 designs in a given rotation/flipping.  So there will be 8 fonts, the first will have all 90 designs not rotated/flipped, the second will have all 90 designs rotated 90 degrees, the next will have all 90 designs rotated 180 degrees and so on. It works better this way because:

• There are only 95 keys on most (American anyway) keyboards, so that 96th geomorph design is hard to add to a document.
• Having all permutations of just one die takes 48 characters, but someone using the font wouldn’t get much true variety without switching fonts.
• Only 224 characters can be in a symbol font, so the whole set couldn’t be done in one font file anyway.

But if you can point out a better way to make the fonts, please do.*  That’s one of the nice things about an open process.   More feedback is a good thing.  So please do install the font and give it a try and post any other feedback you have about it.

Here’s the font file: http://www.dungeonmorphs.com/freestuff/DungeonMorphTest-BZ.ttf

* In fact, I’m wondering if each font file should have 1 version of each of the 90 geomorph designs, but they should be at different rotations/flips.  If the fonts are set up this way then to make a large random dungeon you can select one font, type a few characters, then switch fonts and then type a few more, and so on.  If each font file has the same rotation, it won’t look very random if you type several characters in a row at the same rotation… Hmmm.

**Also note I’m still playing with the font on the Mac.  For some reason, open office on the mac it is not giving the characters enough height, such that the top 45% or so is lost.  GIMP on the mac suffers the same issue, but in GIMP one can easily increase the line spacing.