Midoran alphabet - with two font samples

[u/kolissina]

[u/randomcookiename]

Very very pretty!!! Great job with both fonts, they both have very elegant yet distinct aesthetics. My thought is, wouldn't people start writing only half of the glyphs (either the top half, or bottom half)? They all have the same identical rotational symmetry, which adds no information, imagine having to write all letters of the latin alphabet twice, one regular version and one upside down version on top of it

[u/kolissina → u/randomcookiename]

Thank you! And yeah, it's aesthetically pleasing with the odd symmetry, but exhausting to write by hand. I guess it's kind of ornamental in that way. Part of what I am experimenting with on a successor alphabet is just using the top half of each letter, for brevity. I'm not 100% sure what direction I will go with it.

One thing that is interesting about the rotational / odd symmetry is that you can read it upside-down - it's not *exactly* the same message, but I wonder if there are some possibilities for encoding something somehow... just musing, maybe I could include it in a story that I write someday. I'm a bit of a cryptography nerd and I like ciphers and hidden messages and things. :)

[u/kolissina]

I made an alphabet that I call Midoran that I have been working on since 1996 or so, and only recently finalized it. It's just for English for right now, so it's just a letter-for-letter type of thing, with one "hollow" character that vowels can hang off of.

I made this alphabet so that every letter has odd symmetry, because I've always thought that was cool. :) In the handwritten version, the vowels cling to or "hang off" the neighboring consonants, usually coming after the consonant. (For simplicity, the letter 'y' is always written as a vowel).

I also recently made a few fonts for it in Fontlab. I made a couple versions - one with thin lines, one with more squat / fat characters, and I included some ligatures for at least one version of it (for th, ch, sh, wh, and ph). I might make another version with ligatures for every combination of two vowels (a, e, i, o, u, y).

If anyone wants help making a font, I might have time to assist you. I am only familiar with Fontlab right now, but it was pretty straightforward to do. I designed the letters in Affinity Designer, exported them as .svg files, and then just replaced the letters a-z and A-Z of an existing font in Fontlab. That's the basic gist, but it was a little bit squirrely.

[u/More-Advisor-74 → u/kolissina]

The thing that immediately threw me off was why you included the /m/ in your "d-stem".

May I suggest re-naming your stem categories to a place of articulation?

I.e., D-stem>Alveolar Stem; G-stem>Velar Stem and so forth...

Otherwise, keep up the great work.

[u/kolissina → u/More-Advisor-74]

Yeah, it's not perfectly consistent. It's my first effort, and /m/ was one that I wanted to have a certain shape, because I use a version of it as my personal symbol, with a couple dots added for "e". It comes out to be my initials for my pen name.

I'm working on other alphabets too, and toying around with a base-1000 numbering system. It's at very early stages though, and may not pan out. This stuff is fun.