Latin Fonts
Inspired by the cute little espresso coffee bars in New Zealand, I designed the font Catharsis Macchiato to be used in signs and menus of such cafés. I'm sure you can find plenty of other uses as well.
Catharsis Macchiato supports the most
common non-English characters and features a set of snappy
two-character ligatures to spice things up. They are mapped onto
lesser-known character slots easily accessible by ALT or ALT-SHIFT
combinations on a Mac. Important: The Itchy Dog logo may not be used commercially or without explicit reference to me. I might yet use it myself.
Available for Mac and PC.
A sister font of Catharsis Macchiato, Catharsis Espresso
replaces lowercase letters with extrawide uppercase, and provides a few
alternate letter shapes as well as ligatures. The disclaimer about the
Itchy Dog logo also applies here.
Available for
Mac and
PC.
For Jovian, my conlang
based on High Latin, I devised a script that should unite a sense of reverend
antiqueness with modern design cues and an original look: Catharsis Requiem. It comes in two flavors, one with a calligraphic pen and one with an isotropic
solid line. You don't need to download them separately, since I've
declared the solid one to be the bold face of the calligraphic one.
I've added all the special characters needed to write German,
Scandinavian languages, Spanish, French, Portuguese etc. Don't you
just hate it when you download a font, just to find out it doesn't fulfill
your linguistic needs?
Available in TrueType for
Mac and
PC.
Here's a font designed to resemble Arabic cursive writing, called Catharsis Bedouin. It features initial, medial and final forms
for all letters, as well as a host of terminators, connectors,
ligatures and accents. With a Mac, the usage is quite simple,
since the ALT and SHIFT keys allow easy access to the alternate letter
forms. On a PC, a character map or unicode entry might be
necessary. =P A brief overview of the special characters is
included in the readme file.
Available in TrueType for
Mac and
PC.
Catharsis Cargo is a bit of an experiment, insofar as it probably
violates quite a few laws of the typographic arts... it's
certainly no good for writing a diploma thesis, but it oughta do well
for the "Caution: Fragile" print on a cargo crate, or for the "Warning:
Variable Gravity" sign in a shuttle hangar. ;-)
Available in TrueType for
Mac and
PC.
Finally, here's a rather stupid little
graphic font that I call
Catharsis Circular. I'm not quite sure
whether it's usable for anything at all. =P
Again, there are TrueType files available for both Mac and PC.
Cirnaja
This is a font I created for one of my conlangs,
Obrenje. It allows two modes of writing: Alphabet mode and
diacritic mode. In the latter, vowels are placed as diacritics above
the previous consonants. The alphabet is also easily adapted to other
languages than Obrenje.
There is a smooth and professional Bookhand style and a more elaborate
Calligraphy style available. Both are in TrueType format.
Here you can download Cirnaja Bookhand for Mac or PC, and Cirnaja Calligraphy for Mac or PC.
The two different writing modes are demonstrated for both styles in these
illustrations: Bookhand Alphabetic, Bookhand Diacritic, Calligraphy Alphabetic,
Calligraphy Diacritic.
The key mappings of Cirnaja fonts, while intended to be intuitive, might
not be instantly clear. Therefore, I have prepared a word document
to serve as a reference. You can download that
key map here.
German Tengwar Mode
Tengwar is the writing system that JRR Tolkien invented for his Elves. The
font subsequently used is not my creation either; it's called Tengwar Parmaite
and can be downloaded
here.
Thanks to the versatility of the writing system, it can be used for many
different languages. In Tolkien's world, Quenya, Sindarin, Westron and even
Black Speech are rendered in it. Furthermore, Tolkien detailed a way of
writing English in Tengwar.
I have devised a way of writing the German language in Tengwar. The instructions can be found
here. They are in German, but you probably have very little use for this mode if you don't know German. ;-)
© 2005 by Christian Thalmann
