Many fictional alphabets have no font. Some have a key chart: a picture of each glyph with its letter printed under or over it. The Beast Wars Maximal and Predacon alphabets, the High Moon Studios Cybertron glyphs, Greco-Sol from Transformers Animated and the Cyberglyphics of the live-action films all reach us this way. The Gravity Falls alchemic cipher reaches us as one image for each letter on the Gravity Falls Wiki.
conscryption-kit turns a chart like this into a TrueType font, and then uses that font like any other.
The layout is data
The scheme record of each chart says where the glyph band and the label band of each row are, and which character each label names. No chart has code of its own. A new chart needs a new record, not a new program.
From ink to glyphs
- The label band is cut into label clusters (runs of columns that have ink). Each cluster gives one x centre.
- Each connected piece of ink in the glyph band goes to the nearest label centre. A glyph made of dots and bars stays one glyph.
- Each glyph keeps its height in the band, so a dot above the line stays above it.
- OpenCV finds the outer contours and the holes of each glyph, and fontTools writes them into a TrueType font.
A second method reads the labels
The layout could be wrong: a row could be one column off. So the kit reads the printed labels back. It thins each label to a one-pixel centre line (Zhang-Suen thinning), compares it with the same text drawn in reference fonts, and assigns labels to positions one-to-one with the Hungarian method. Thinning removes the stroke weight, and the one-to-one assignment removes typeface confusions such as a serif I and J. The test passes only if the labels that the kit reads are the labels that the layout names.
Numbers too
The Maximal chart also prints the numbers 1 to 20, and the Predacon chart prints 1 to 10. The kit traces those glyphs too and puts them in the Unicode Private Use Area, from U+E100. That is why R2D2 works in Maximal, but 25 does not: see No placeholder skulls.
A coloring-book key
For Cyberglyphics, the key with all 26 letters is a Revenge of the Fallen coloring-book page, “Crack the Code!”. The page also prints a puzzle and its answer. A test decodes the puzzle glyphs with the traced font and must get the printed answer: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN.
The results
The traced fonts are derivatives of the charts, so they stay on the machine that built them. This blog shows only the phrases that the fonts drew.
A fan project. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Disney, Hasbro, Paramount or Nickelodeon. The scripts, characters and names belong to their owners. The Avatarian image is shared under CC BY-SA 3.0 (glyphs and rules: User:TechFilmer, Avatar Wiki).