Eugene, a new free French style SMuFL font

[mikkop]

Hello there!

My original post seems to have disappeared during the temporary outage of the forum, so here goes again.

I've been interested in font design and vector graphics for ages, but only lately got inspired to try and learn some glyph drawing with Inkscape and FontForge. Soon I found myself creating my first SMuFL compliant music font.

My font is inspired by the engraving style found in E. Fromont publications. E. Fromont was a Parisian music publisher active from 1885 to 1922. The primary visual references I have so far used are Debussy works from the Fromont catalog, including: Prélude à "l'Après-midi d'un faune" (1895), Ariettes Oubliées (1903) and Suite bergamasque (1905).

The font is named after Eugène Fromont, the founder of the publishing house.

Any feedback and tips from more experienced font creators is warmly welcomed. It's early days, I just released the first public version on Github where you will also find a list of all the glyphs (86 glyphs at the time of writing this).
I'm using Bravura glyphs as fallback.

eugeneariettes.png (285.16 KiB) Viewed 4878 times

[sugarfree]

Congratulations on your project. Creating a SMuFL font can be a challenging task. I looked into Eugene.otf, and you might find the following tutorial on drawing vector paths useful. https://glyphsapp.com/learn/drawing-good-paths

[mikkop]

Congratulations on your project. Creating a SMuFL font can be a challenging task. I looked into Eugene.otf, and you might find the following tutorial on drawing vector paths useful. https://glyphsapp.com/learn/drawing-good-paths

Thank you for checking out the font!
The tutorial you provided seems super helpful and I'll be definitely doing some thorough fixing on several glyphs this week after reading it!
I added the most common ornament glyphs today and will propably reach 100 glyphs in the upcoming days, and before moving on from that will focus on making the existing stuff tidier, since I've already improved quite a bit at handling those vector curves.
I'll propably give the Glyphs app trial a go, just to see how much a commercial app could improve the workflow compared to the free ones I'm currently running. Of course the basics propably stay the same.

[John Ruggero]

Successful recreation of older music fonts, like yours, seems to be a time-consuming business. I wonder if this will not become a matter of simple scanning in the future and wonder why it isn't at present.

[mikkop]

Successful recreation of older music fonts, like yours, seems to be a time-consuming business. I wonder if this will not become a matter of simple scanning in the future and wonder why it isn't at present.

Considering how accurately services like Soundslice can already scan and recognize music glyphs, I wouldn't be surprised if proper vector creation became possible within the next few years. Of course some very high resolution scans are required so the algorithm doesn't end up including crazy amounts of path nodes because of some blur when zooming in.
I did try out the bitmap autotracing of a couple of vector drawing apps and they can definitely help in getting started on some glyphs, but having a finished result automatically doesn't seem to be possible just yet.

[mikkop]

Hello there again!
Some updates:

Glyph count has today almost reached the halfway point to my initial goal of ~500, and at 236 glyphs the font is starting to become quite usable at least for tonal music. It’s rather hard to find a glyphs from that 1890-1910 Paris/Fromont publishing time period I haven’t yet included, so lately I’ve been focusing on modeling more “anachronistic” ones like slash noteheads.

If anyone is interested in trying the font out, the latest build is on Github and I’d be very interested in hearing if you can spot any obvious oversights or bugs, or visual choices you stongly disagree with. I got the Musescore related problems sorted (for both 3.7 Evolution and 4.7), and dropped the fallback glyphs since they add unnecessary clutter in the files.

If you want to quickly compare Eugene with Bravura and Leland, here’s the first page of Ariettes oubliées set in those three different fonts:

Comparison Eugene-Bravura-Leland.pdf

(207.4 KiB) Downloaded 246 times

I also published a full solo piano piece, 100% Eugene glyphs:

Eugene sample - Ice Run for piano.pdf

(111.53 KiB) Downloaded 235 times

[mikkop]

Hello again!

The font has grown significantly since the previous posts, and I just published v 1.311 on the fonts website and Github.

I’ve also made a handful of engraving samples in different sizes to showcase the font in one pdf, take a look. And all sorts of comments are of course warmly welcome.
https://mikkopatama.com/eugenefont/Euge ... Scores.pdf

Tomorrow heading for a holiday trip for a couple fo weeks, so next time I’ll be taking a look at these glyphs propably in July. Hope you enjoy the font.

[OCTO]

Wonderful!