William Overington

I have this morning designed, using the FontCreator 8 program, some language-independent glyphs for some sentences that involve metallic colours. I produced a font and installed it in Windows 10. This image was produced using the font in Affinity Designer. The language-independent glyphs have meanings defined which, when localized into English, produce the following, respectively from the top downwards. The colour is gold. The colour is silver. The colour is bronze. The colour is copper. William

A poem about what happened here yesterday. This is a png file as a detail from a design for a card similar to the first one in this thread. The rest of the card artwork is blank at present. The following may be of interest if you want to localize the poem into a natural language, as it includes localizations into English for each of the language-independent glyphs in the poem. http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/locse027.pdf William

I saw somewhere on the Papier website that they ask for one not to be included, but say that if one is obliged to use one then they suggested a specific one to use. Yes. However for these particular graphics of the software unicorns the only source I had was some files that I made for the web in 1998 using some clip art from Microsoft Office as the starting point. Having found the Papier facility and thus be able to get good quality prints onto card in a one-off quantity I decided to get the best that I could. This most recent card order has a pale blue background and when I tried changing to CMYK the blue went quite dark, so I decided to send it as sRGB and hope for the best, bearing in mind that the colours are always a bit darker on card than on the screen on the basis that the result might be better but possibly not worse. It was basically a choice of either getting the print that I could starting with an RGB image that was screen resolution quality and magnifying it three times both horizontally and vertically, or not having a print at all. As it is a relatively inexpensive greeting card print I decided to have the print. I am really pushing the boundary with it as the cards are marketed as photo greetings cards and I am using computer generated artwork and framing the results using frames that I get from the supermarket delivered with the grocery. The people at the Papier business have been very helpful over guiding me in my efforts to produce these prints. The prints that I get are of good print quality, like the quality greetings cards that one can buy at museums and art galleries and some shops. They cost about twice as much, which, considering that they are one-off and personalized is to me a very reasonable price. There are basically three types - their artwork plus personalized greeting, their artwork augmented with customer photograph(s) and personalized greeting, customer photograph and personalized greeting. There is an option for no printed greeting so that the customer can write a greeting in the blank area. So I am using the customer photograph and personalized greeting option except that I am using artwork rather than a photograph and where the greeting would go I am placing a title, description, my name, and date (month, year). So pushing the boundary with what are intended as everyday greetings cards. They also do framed prints using twelve ink colours so I have the chance to get one or more of those. William

Thank you. It was set to English (United States). So I have changed it to English (United Kingdom). William

How do I check the interface language setting please? Is it in the Affinity software or in the computer more generally? William

File Document Setup... Second button from the left on the bar that is just a bit above the middle of the dialogue panel. William

I have just started a thread. https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/142416-industrial-quality-colour-printing-technology/ William

Is there anyone reading this who can advise on industrial quality colour printing technology please? In three posts of Tuesday 18 May 2021 on page 6 of the thread https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/138654-artwork-for-greetings-cards/ there is an issue that is puzzling me. Briefly, there is a company named Papier that prints photo greetings cards in one-off quantities. https://www.papier.com/ Upload a photo, personalize the text of the greeting, place an order, and the card arrives in the post, or, if one so chooses, is sent direct to a chosen recipient. I have produced a number of cards and got excellent results. In fact, not one of my images has been a photograph, they have all been jpg files exported from Affinity Designer. In fact, I get frames from the supermarket, delivered with the grocery, and I frame the prints. The text that is notionally the greeting is on my cards, title, details, my name and the date, (month year). The cards are printed and posted by an outside contractor and arrive from Guernsey. Papier specifies CMYK. Yet I have now realized that I have sent at least two previously with RGB and got good prints. So I am wondering if anyone happens to know if industrial printers have a way of converting an RGB image to CMYK, possibly automated, as frankly a necessary facility as perhaps customers often send RGB files? William

I have now placed an order for the card. William

Thinking about this, it occurs to me that as the cards are intended as photo cards and quite probably some (many?) people are uploading photos taken on mobile phones and are not using editing software, that it is quite possible that RGB colour files are arriving at the Papier system quite often. So it seems that for the system to be of general usefulness for photo cards that there may well be automated conversion. As I got good results from earlier cards that appear to have gone as RGB, I am going to start this artwork again and use the same process as before and hopefully I will get a good print, perhaps better than if I start altering the colour format myself. So delete the unicorns3.afdesign file that I produced earlier. Start by saving a copy of unicorn2.afdesign as unicorns3.afdesign. Only one unicorn in this image, but I have opted for file name consistency for the series of designs. Replace the image by the new image. So the afdesign file is already using pixels for measurement and is 2171 pixels wide by 1571 pixels high with 300 dots per inch. Locate the upper left corner of the image at (100, 100). The image in 536 pixels wide by 402 pixels high. Change this to 1608 pixels wide (=3 * 536) by 1206 pixels high (=3 * 402). Centre the image on the page, both horizontally and vertically. Save the design. Export as 300dpi_unicorns3.jpg best quality (100) with no colour profile and no bleeds. The no bleeds choice is because the whole document already has bleed areas built into it. William

I am now preparing the artwork for a card based on the following gif file that I produced in 1998. Recovered from the following web page. http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/euto0008.htm Start by saving a copy of unicorn2.afdesign as unicorns3.afdesign. Only one unicorn in this image, but I have opted for file name consistency for the series of designs. Replace the image by the new image. So the afdesign file is already using pixels for measurement and is 2171 pixels wide by 1571 pixels high with 300 dots per inch. Though I have just noticed that Color [sic] is set as RGB/8. Though checking back, so are unicorns2.afdesign and unicorns1.afdesign but Papier specifies CMYK. However the two previous prints came out great, so maybe something gets done along the line somewhere. However, change it to CMYK in this document. Select the ISO Uncoated profile, but when exporting export without a colour profile. So delete the image and place a new copy. Ah, the blue surround looks duller. So I think the best thing to do is to post this as it is and hope that one or more other forum participants will offer advice please. William

Recently I made another card. It is quite interesting technically. The starting image was this one, from 1998. It is from the following web page. http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/euto2001.htm However, my usual technique of enlarging to exactly three times the size both horizontally and vertically produced an image larger than the 2171 pixels by 1571 pixels needed. So I had to decide whether to enlarge by three times and lose a bit at at least two of the edges, or enlarge by 2 point something times. In the event I chose enlarging by three times and losing a bit at the edge. This was because I was unsure as to what effect a non-integer enlargement would have on a bit map image. Of the cards that I have produced thus far, this is only the second one where I have planned that the colour goes right to the edge. The print has come out well with a superb quality of printing. The black at the top goes over the fold of the card and slightly onto the back, which is good. I suppose that it is effectively the bleed area at the top which has not been cut off. The card is now framed in an A4 landscape frame. The graphic of a hedgehog is similarly framed too. I have also got a second copy of Software Unicorns reflected in a Lake, as I already had one copy framed landscape style in an A4 frame, but I managed to get some more of the oak effect frames with mount for a 7 inch by 5 inch image, and there was a spare picture hook where in 2018 I needed to move a larger picture so that some surface mounted electrical ducting (only about 12 mm square in section) was to be installed - that picture is now displayed elsewhere. Yet there was good room to place the much smaller oak effect frame there. So rather than unframe the original card I got another copy, though redated as May 2021 so that the two copies are not identical. Getting it onto the wall was quite tricky, as the hook was a larger brass plated fitting and the hook on the frame was not big enough to go over it. Fortunately, however, I had bought a picture framing kit and a multi-purpose tool set from Tesco some time ago, just in case I needed either or both some time, so with some picture wire from the picture framing kit and the cutters and the pointed nose pliers from the tool kit I was able to make a loop of picture wire to go through the Tesco fitting of the frame and then over the hook of the fitting on the wall. https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/298571282 https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/293099221 Both are flagged as not available. The picture hanging kit went to half price for clearance, so I bought another two. I do not know if the toolkit will become available again. The images are just to give an idea, such things are also available elsewhere at other suppliers. I do not have enough hooks to display every picture on the wall. It is not just a matter of hammering in a nail as it needs someone with an electronic gadget to detect if there are electrical cables there. William

Are you going to do a view from the other side? Maybe there is a puzzled-looking dragon looking at the tip of the finger. William

Thank you. I have not heard of 'Power duplicate' before reading your post. Does your solution rotate some of the glyphs? Would the glyphs for 9 and 3 both need to be viewed from the left? Or from the right? I was thinking of having a design where the glyphs are not rotated, as in the pharmacy wall clocks where the glyphs all seem to be upright, as I think were the ones that I saw on a clock in a pharmacy years ago. If the glyphs were on the plate of a horizontal plate sundial, then that would be different than for a clock placed on a vertical wall. William

There is also the following slide show. http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/slide_show_about_localizable_sentences.pdf The slides can be read using a browser, but best results are a full screen display by downloading a copy to local storage and then displaying it using Adobe Reader. There are notes about that on the following page. http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/localizable_sentences_research.htm William

Here is a link to the font. http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/LOCSE977.TTF I made the font myself with the High-Logic FontCreator program. The glyphs for this design are at U+E100 through to U+E10B in the Private Use Area of the font, in the required order, as I used the resistor colour code as the basis for the order in which to place the glyphs when I made the font. Please note that the Private Use Area mapping is just for convenience of using the TrueType font, they are not intended for use in interchange of document, though at a push could be in some circumstances for research. As a side issue, not to do with this design, the codes that I am using for experimental interchange in my research are in the following document. http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/A_List_of_Code_Numbers_and_English_Localizations_for_use_in_Research_on_Communication_through_the_Language_Barrier_using_encoded_Localizable_Sentences.pdf The codes for colours are displayed on page 3 of the document. The codes can be used in a glyph substitution liga table as used for ligature in an OpenType font. William

https://www.hobbies.co.uk/double-spade-pair-of-hands So it looks possible. Though it might need a panel to mount the card upon and maybe a box to contain it all. William

The discussion about clocks in the thread https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/142050-my-first-image-using-affinity-designer/ has inspired me to wonder if I can design a clock that uses some of the glyphs that I have designed for localizable sentences. Maybe get a landscape greeting card from Papier, get a clock mechanism and get them put together by someone skilled in the art for a fee. So, applying the resistor colour code, and using zero rather than 12, and adding cyan for 10 and pink for 11, there is the basic design specification. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_color_code#Color_band_system http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/localizable_sentences_the_novel_chapter_005.pdf The glyphs are displayed on page 4 I am thinking that I need to calculate twelve points on a circle, then, in Affinity Designer, have a text box with a glyph centred in it, then copy the text box eleven times and edit each of the eleven copies, so as to have twelve text boxes each with a single glyph, one for each colour. Then use the transform panel with measurements on the centre of the text box and place each text box such that its centre is on the appropriate point on the circle. Care needs to be taken to have the point size of the glyphs to be such that the overall design effect is aesthetically pleasing. I have found this. https://www.hobbies.co.uk/german-quartz-clock-movements William

https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5209?installation_image_index=35 Please click on the centre of the nearby blue disc for further information. To me, the stated dimensions do not seem to go with the image as they seem to indicate a shape more like a cuboid than a panel. https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5209 William .

An interesting story that I have told before elsewhere might be of interest. One day in the early 1970s I observed two researchers with a large Spanish and English dictionary trying to understand a research paper in what they had thought was Spanish. I glanced at it and said that it was not Spanish, but was Portuguese. In astonishment in his voice, one of the researchers asked me "Do you speak Portuguese?" I replied "No, but I am interested in printing and I know that that 'a' with that accent is used in Portuguese but not in Spanish." As it happens some years previously I had seen in a catalogue for Riscatype, a brand name for a metal type foundry then based in Risca, South Wales, a list of the accented characters needed for various European languages and had studied it with some interest. I have later learned that the character is an 'a tilde'. The accents used in the various languages are quite interesting. Some used in several languages, some in just one language. The tilde accent in just a few languages, the caron in just a few languages William

Looking at the two images, I find that they appear to use the same symbols as each other for each of the hours. William

I have now found the following. https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F700.pdf Please note 1F729 and https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2600.pdf Please note 2643 William

Not exactly. The one I saw was white and did not have the fancy shaped pointers, but otherwise was very much like it. Thank you for posting. William

Going off-topic, but something vaguely related, some years ago, maybe around twenty-five years ago, I saw a rather stylish clock on the wall of a small independent pharmacy business. It was white plastic and I think square, about 8 inches square, quite possibly with an electric mechanism, with pointers. Instead of ordinary digits, there were twelve alchemical signs, moulded and raised and with a gold look, maybe 96 point or thereabouts. I remember that instead of the digit 4 there was the symbol that looks vaguely like a figure 4. It looked very stylish. This is not it, but does give a general idea. https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/comments/aswvnd/obviously_this_clock_has_something_to_do_with/ William

I like the clock. Is it based on a real clock or is it your own novel design? William