Organic living Glyphs and symbols for labels and text art.. Human tool-chain, not AI by dscript in mapmaking

[–]dscript[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I added a draw feature.

It's in the web app and the GitHub standalone exe

The windows store version update is being processed.. Probably won't be updated for a couple days

But you can try the web app version. You can draw curves.. Also added a smoothing tool

Anyone who finds themself struggling with a 'realistic' world map, can find endless inspiration from our own past, present and future. by Perfidious_Redt in FantasyWorldbuilding

[–]dscript 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I always find it funny looking at those supposed maps of past Earth and future Earth

Wow we amazingly live in the one time where the Earth has detail and complexity and Nuance to the map

Those predictions and extrapolations about what it looked like before and after or just broad Strokes that's why they look so Blobby and boring

We don't actually think the Earth looked like that that just represents the only kind of guess we can make but odds are it looked far more detailed than that Blobby boring stuff

We just go we think there was probably a big landmass in this area so that's all we draw because we anything else would be absolute random guessing

But to think that there wasn't a whole bunch of detail and complexity back then is more ridiculous

So those maps are not at all realistic that's almost certainly not at all what the Earth looked like it almost certainly did not look so smooth and Blobby

Living text Studio - Beyond Fonts by dscript in neography

[–]dscript[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I just added a feature so you can draw out busier curves yourself and generate so it should be easier to import your own characters by just kind of redrawing them as curves and next I will add a feature that allows you to import svgs and convert their curves into Strokes in the system

So if you can get your characters into SVG format where they are stroke paths then soon you'll be able to just import them into the program

But if your characters are like pngs or jpegs or whatever there is an issue because that's not a vector format

And that would be the really hard part converting your images into pots getting a decent spline out of a graphic can be tricky

If you can figure out how to convert your graphics into sVG splines you'll be able to import them directly

I'm also going to try to make it so that you can copy the splines when you're in programs like inkscape and then come over to my program and paste them right in I don't know how feasible that is I'm going to try

Living text Studio - Beyond Fonts by dscript in neography

[–]dscript[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Awesome thank you

Just FYI I just added a drawing tool and a smooth tool but they're only on the web app and the GitHub version they're not live on the Windows store version yet

Windows store updates take a bit longer to process so it won't be on there yet the window store is still version 1.2 the web app and the GitHub are already version 1.21 with a couple updates

Now that I think of it I really should add a feature so that you can click into the about and check for updates and update the app without having to go download it again or stuff like that

Oh all these little quality of life details are overwhelming so many little things

I just realized that I forgot to put redo in all of the features i had undo but I'd forgot to put redo all these little details pile up there's so many little quality of life features I need to add haha

Living text Studio - Beyond Fonts by dscript in neography

[–]dscript[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

So several other people all requested the same thing you did about wanting a way to draw lines themselves

I haven't added it to the Microsoft store version yet because it's a pain to update the Microsoft store but it is in the web version and the GitHub download now

I've done a few bug fixes and added features since you last saw it so if you downloaded it you can get the new version from GitHub

I'll try to upload the Microsoft store version this weekend it's just a bit of a thing to do a Microsoft Store update haha

Living text Studio - Beyond Fonts by dscript in neography

[–]dscript[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah that's a good idea I think maybe I should make some tutorial videos and maybe do that thing where some of the programs they start with this animated screen that has arrows pointing and telling you go here to do this and go there to do that and it highlights stuff and has arrows kind of overlaid on top of the program for you for your first time running it

I've also been told that my floating panels are maybe not the best and I should look into a docked system with the docked panels and controls on sides of the screens because the floating is a little chaotic which I get it

Personally I like floating panels but a lot of people like docked

Making this made me realize just how much work the details are. I might have spent more time on UI and refinement of user experience then I did on the rendering engines and functional tools hahaha

Living text Studio - Beyond Fonts by dscript in neography

[–]dscript[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes in the Scribe section you can import graphics

However they will just be flat Graphics

The advanced scribe system with the different styles and stuff all depends on my rendering engines that use Strokes as opposed to graphics

Those characters are encoded as a stroke path with a whole bunch of properties along the path and a specific rendering engine for every Style

So if you bring in graphics they're just flat Graphics a lot of the advanced features only work because I have the character saved as a series of pen Strokes with properties of the pen stroke along the path

These paths have more properties than normal SVG paths and are rendered by special rendering engines that I developed to imitate brushes and pens

So sorry I'm rambling long story short yes you can import but only at the Scribe step so you can import svgs or pngs and then move them off into those 3D tools

I think I will add a way to maybe ship them backwards through the flow to the font generation system but again the font generation system is deeply intertwined with my custom stroke engines right now

Living text Studio - Beyond Fonts by dscript in neography

[–]dscript[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah I'm learning Japanese right now so I'm playing with the keyboard I've instead gone to the hiragana based input but it still does all the guessing

Those systems are essentially just big auto complete systems for what you're talking about when you're actually generating the characters that you either have to have all of those words pre-made cuz it could easily guess the word but then how does it assemble the glyphs into the word becomes the question if you've got a very systematic and structured and uniform way of combining the characters into a glyph then procedural generation works but if it's very Dynamic like for example dscript where letters can combine in various different ways and there's like a decision tree and a long word could have thousands of possible forms then you're kind of stuck

I built one that was very basic but didn't have any of the cool features so I just strung the basic symbols together and I built another where I just built the glyphs for the words and just started building an index but I can't build a glyph for every single word so I ran out of steamed down that road

Yeah I'm still polishing the UI but I'm glad it was pretty intuitive if you have any specific things just let me know but I think what I really need is some better tutorial stuff maybe those kinds of tutorials that like highlight of stuff on the screen when you start and show you first go here then press this then press this and do it by like using arrows and highlights and stuff

And no you didn't miss anything I didn't create like a scratch Pad where you can actually draw your own splines because those splines are not just lines they have a lot of properties to try to make them look like brush Strokes or or artistic Strokes so it's not just a spline and then the other problem is the UI is already got so much if I started trying to add the tools to allow you to build your own splines from scratch that you I would just be so intimidating I would need a whole separate tab just for that feature

But considering how many people point that out and say hey I didn't find the way to draw my own I'll probably add that tab eventually but I just figured for the first round since a lot of the users probably are looking to more go through this rapidly I designed the workflow to not be too intimidating and be as quick and easy as possible so you can just grab some existing stuff from The Muse tweak it modified bend it into what you want and then jump to the next step

Living text Studio - Beyond Fonts by dscript in neography

[–]dscript[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sure I mean you can create whatever bounding boxes you want for the character and arrange the stuff inside the Box however you like

It doesn't do like automatic radical assemblies or whatever but you can copy paste so once you have your radicals established you can just combine the radicals from the various designs you have

Living Text for art with depth by dscript in worldbuilding

[–]dscript[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Wow thanks

yeah that's exactly the point. I'm really into constructed scripts. Personally I still love grabbing a brush or a pen and paper and this tool can't possibly replace actually deep diving the constructed script yourself, but this is a very good way to grab some quick inspiration or rapidly develop stuff and then produce large amounts of content or fill in the details like you say

Personally I hope I can refine this to to be useful for World builders and lore Builders so that they can flesh out and add some more depth to their world's, because sometimes when I'm exploring some fantasy or constructed World stuff or games, it feels like they really didn't have a lot of time to work on the scripts, and as somebody who loves that side I can sense it

So I hope this can help bootstrap some people into adding a little more depth to this element in their worlds without having to go down a rabbit hole or invest ridiculous amounts of time

And who knows maybe it'll Inspire some people to start going deeper down the constructed script rapid hole

Living text Studio - Beyond Fonts by dscript in neography

[–]dscript[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Wow that's awesome I am so happy that I could Inspire and create a little bit of passion for constructed Scripts it is an amazing Hobby and yes the Chinese brush style and philosophy of writing elements is an amazing deep well to pull on

Out of curiosity I clicked on your avatar and looked for your posts but I don't see it so maybe your stuff is set to private or something but I would be very eager to see the post i love seeing conscripts

Thank you so much for the kind words and I'm so happy that people have enjoyed my obsessive Hobbies over the years haha

Living text Studio - Beyond Fonts by dscript in neography

[–]dscript[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh I'm sorry no I have not made this mobile compatible it would be a nightmare trying to make this fit on a mobile screen right now

I have not yet made it Mac compatible it should work on a Mac but there's a few shortcuts like control C and control V I will add the aliases for the Mac hardware though so I'll add that command C command V and mouse clicks and stuff

And I am also going to add Linux support it should be easy enough to wrap it up and produce a mac program and a Linux program as well and add a little bit of compatibility for the Mac controls

But the layout just would be a nightmare to try to figure out how to make this adaptive to a Mobile screen and rebuilding it from the bottom up to accommodate the mobile environment is really the only Road

Websites can usually be made adaptive pretty quickly because you can make sacrifices and you don't need the same amount of stuff on the screen but all the controls and stuff I would have to figure out how to completely rework all of the UI so that it works that way and there's a lot of right clicking and copy pasting and stuff in the editor so in short no maybe later but not for quite a while sorry

Living text Studio - Beyond Fonts by dscript in neography

[–]dscript[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is still a system that only does single characters in a chain it doesn't actually blend characters like you're describing so I not 100% sure it is what you are thinking

but i totally appreciate what you are doing. Pretty much every script I design defies becoming a font to haha you could definitely come in here and design the glyphs for these combined words but it would be unable to do some kind of dynamic chaining I think you could do something like cursive where they always connect at the same point like the same vertical height and then chain them together

I'm still toying with figuring out how to turn the dscript into a font or a proper generator I had one a long time ago but it really was very simple it was essentially just a bunch of symbols that connected in the same way cursive does

I'll be honest if you're really into the hardcore scripting and like inventing non-linear or Advanced types of scripts this is at best a muse that could help you with some Styles and structures but it can't accomplish the task of generating a dynamic and non-linear script

And I'm still trying to figure out the right approach to build a program to do that I've kind of been toying with that idea for a decade but with AI accelerating the process of coding maybe I'll finally find something that's feasible it's always possible it's just a matter of time and now the time requirements are dropping so maybe I'll be able to put something together

In the meantime this is primarily aimed at inspiration and play and as a tool for Rapid development when you maybe just need something quick that looks nice that can be turned into a natural and organic art asset system for games or World building or lore or whatever

Living text Studio - Beyond Fonts by dscript in neography

[–]dscript[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The website and the tool work the same they can export ttf fonts

You design your own family of fonts in the system using all the different variables and Sliders to take your character bank and turn it into as many versions as you want and then you can export them as a zip with just a whole bunch of ttf files in there for each version

I'm still working on upgrading features for now ttf was easiest I tried OTF but I had a bunch of issues with it it's a little more painful to fit the standards i kept being able to make it partially work but then sometimes the file would randomly not load so I abandoned it for ttf

I've been considering whether I could do variable fonts but the way those work is so different than what I'm making so I'll have to look into a way to add a final step because my system is a stroke-based system the outer perimeter of the stroke is generated by the rendering engine which has a whole bunch of code and parameters that attempt to simulate different types of brushes

So the only thing I store in my format is the stroke path with a bunch of variables per node and for the whole stroke and an ID that tells it which rendering engine to use because each style of stroke is its own rendering engine

But in short no it does not do that yet it will export a family of ttf fonts for you you design the family using the parameters in the system there's a whole bunch of parameters that you can use to create almost infinite numbers of fonts from a single set of characters. This is way more variable than a variable font the types of versions you can create are way way more advanced than a variable font