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The first ten pages of Dutton's Shorthand in Three Days are quite interesting. After that he goes off into the world of using thicker/darker pen strokes to distinguish two different meanings of the same symbol. I dislike that practice.

I'm surveying about 20 different shorthand schemes that were published between 1800 and 1920. I'll report back if any are supergood.

For simplicity and ease of use (very subjective), I'd say FontStruct. It's buggy, the end result is often mediocre and well it's extremely basic so don't expect too much, but I've made some pretty cool fonts with it => http://fontstruct.com

I don't know about windows and I'm not sure what you mean by systematic, but here's a latex document with all the fonts from my tutorial series (the guide on the right), it seems to be working pretty well : https://www.overleaf.com/read/hgbcfsygckdj

Try Devanagari - it has a very high degree of phonemic orthography and is very well developed.

If it is written as though one were writing Sanskrit, it is explicit in its pronunciation and can handle multiple consonant clusters (conjuncts).

Also, try Gurmukhi - it is almost as phonemically orthographic as Devanagari (consonant clusters are simpler in that there are less options, it relies more on you already knowing what a word is [similar to the way that English is spelled so we are no strangers to that]) but I find that it is quicker to write. If I'm writing my shopping list out, I'll write it in Gurmukhi but if there are any words that I have to write that I am not familiar with (or that are just easier to write in Devanagari), I'll write them in Devanagari.

I design Gurmukhi fonts but one that I designed was a look-alike font for Gurmukhi looking like Uchen (Tibetan) and in it, I put a whole load of conjuncts that are not normally in Gurmukhi (ones normally found in English). You can see it here (you can download the fonts for free) or here (Behance)

These are the best-value pens I’ve come across. You don’t have to buy the set, but I recommend it.

Limited-time deal: PILOT Parallel 4 Nib Calligraphy Pen Set, 1.5mm, 2.4mm, 3.8mm & 6.0mm Nibs, Includes 4 Black & 4 Red Ink Cartridges (90078) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B019YLRFFS/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_fabc_DM776Z3V80K6TEH8HZEN

Thanks!

Great! I'm interested to learn about it; I hope it'll be uploaded soon.

As an amateur graphic designer, I used Inkscape, a vector graphics editor similar to Adobe Illustrator and CorelDRAW.

The Elian script is a beautiful variant of the pigpen cipher.

There's also David Peterson's book Create Your Own Secret Language. Ignore the 1-star reviews, they're blatantly homophobic.

Here are links to my font files: Windows, MacOS. I didn't spend too much time on this (only around a week or less of work), so kerning and glyph shapes aren't perfect.

Yeah, I was using Ubuntu when I wrote that guide. Turns out, there was a bug on Windows that prevents copy-pasting.
However this was all a while ago. I hadn't played with FontForge for quite some time, but I just tried uninstalling both Inkscape and FontForge, and downloaded the latest version via Chocolatey — choco install inkscape fontforge — and I'm happy to say that copy-paste works now!

There is still one bug that you need to fix manually. Copy pasting from Inkscape works only up until you copy something within FontForge itself, because it has it own internal clipboard. You will need to set FontForge>File>Preferences>Generic>ExportClipboard>On. Be aware that copy-pasting is still only unidirectional, from Inkscape to FontForge in this case.

 

In case you don't use a package manager, here are the versions that I have. It should work as well if you install them manually ... but maybe not, because FontForge needed to pull AutoHotkey as a dependency for some reason... who knows?
* InkScape v1.0.0.20200612
* fontforge v2020.03.14

I hope that this fixes it for you! Otherwise, I would suggest running FontForge in a Linux VM which is what I did when I switched back to Windows

FontStruct is free and easy.

There are plenty of other google-able programs, but most of them cost a lot of money and all of them require you to first learn how to draw vector graphics like in Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape.

I'm working on disecting this. Is this on the right path? Picture

Ah, if your inside shapes are filled, then its a matter of selecting the inside line and reversing the contour. Contours must be going in opposite directions to work properly.

If Fontforge is causing you major pain, and you are running Windows, you might try using Type Light 3.2 - its easier to use for editing. Now, I don't know if it will allow you to import your glyphs, but at worst it might let you more easily recreate them. Its free, but limited. When I started out that is what I started with. Since then I have switched to the Mac and bought Fontlab Studio. If you like Type Light and have a few bucks you can upgrade to Type which has more features and costs around $60 US if I recall correctly.

Mostly Type Light 3.2 - which is for Windows and is Free but with some limitations (there is an upgrade to a full version called Type which I will be purchasing shortly), but also FontForge which is Open Source. The former is pretty easy to adapt to with some practice, the later is extremely complex (to say the least) but can do just about anything.

Glad you like the look, it was fun to work on.

Allow me to recommend Type Light 3.2. Its free, it is limited in a number of ways, but it is possible to easily make a Conscript using it. The registered version called Type is something like $65 US (and there is a free 30 day trial of it, it has a lot more features than the free Light version naturally).

What I have done so far is make my fonts in Type Light, then if I want to do some ligatures, load it up into FontForge and follow the online instructions for creating a ligature or substitution. I find FontForge to be extremely complex and not that well or clearly documented, but it is a great program.

By monkeying with the shape of my glyphs I have made several fonts that overlap glyphs so that they appear to be joined. I have made a few ligatures so far, but they are unevenly supported in Windows software (to say the least). Now, for ease of use, because I am lazy, I have mapped my fonts to 1252 Latin 1, so that I don't have to switch keyboard layouts every time when I am using them in a document that is otherwise written in English. As a result I don't need to learn a whole new keyboard layout as well, and as a touch typist of more than 20 years practice, I don't really relish the idea of learning new layouts :P

Examples of my Conscripts - note that the last three (Kophtikas, Phagspa90 and Avbackwards are all adaptations of historical natlang scripts). In both Dzerbes and Ashuadi vowels attach to the previous consonant. In Ashuadi, syllables are clustered in fact, so that even a following consonant is attached to the previous consonant+vowel pair. All of these were created with Type Light 3.2.

Edit: the sample text is just a sentence in Hittite that I encountered during my research into my Conlang. I don't have enough of my Conlang developed to produce actual sentences worth using in an example yet.

> I bought Glyphs and used the bundled AFDKO things with it.

Ah, okay. I don’t have MacOS (nor Windows) so that isn’t really an option for me then.

> I don't think you need to add ligatures just to have letters with dots in them if you use combining diacriticals.

I wasn’t quite sure if combining marks were treated the same as ligatures or if they were something else entirely. They seemed like overall the same concept to me, as in combining 2 glyphs to display as 1.

The same link https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=102134 works for me on Google Chrome. You might have to Google Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator on your own device to find a link that works for you.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=102134

>Ever wanted to quickly and easily define your own keyboard layout for a language Microsoft doesn't support? Or define your own keyboard layout so you can quickly and easily enter your favorite symbols with a simple keystroke? Well, want no more: the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator is here!

u/FasterThanHouses shared the programme BirdFont on this sub a while back.

Similar workflow to the others linked here—create your glyphs using a vector graphics editor, and then import them into BirdFont to set kerning and ligatures and such.

Any which way you go about it, it's a lot of work; a bit of learning, and a whole lot of tedious repetition. It's well-worth it, though.

Tulisan Melayu is a Brahmic-based concript I made for Malay. You can see it here on a poster for a brown sugar bubble tea promotion.

The post also includes versions in Tulisan Rumi (Roman alphabet) and Tulisan Jawi (Arabic alphabet), both of which are used to write Malay.

Credit for the original poster goes to the user photographeeasia on Freepik. Please see the original here: https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/brown-sugar-bubble-milk-tea-set-poster-ad-flyer-template-watercolor-illustration_5124838.htm.

One note on the language. I made this script along with an alternate history scenario where Malaysia is still mostly Hindu-Buddhist. Thus, the Malay word for Tuesday (selasa) which is Arabic in origin has been replaced by anggara which is of Sanskrit origin. That's all!

>I was not at all familiar with the mark-to-mark stuff I will say. I wasn't sure if it was used by a font dynamically somehow, or if you needed to make rules to get it to work etc.

You still need the glyphs that are referenced (e.g you cannot delete vowelcarrier nor i if you created a i.car glyph but the mark itself disappears with this library(even if there are multiple ones and only one is used -- which is why I have to add some code to copy it over somewhere in the code)

>Its the same stuff I have been writing only a bit better organized I expect.

Well the thing is, the behaviour of hundreds of substitutions put all together in a feature WITHOUT lookups is way harder to predict. You can try removing the lookups while keeping the same order for the substitutions in my feature file -- It simply doesn't work.

>but that this process takes place programmatically to generate new glyphs and add them, not dynamically while the font is being used. No wonder I had no success with it when I looked at it previously.

Well, it is supposed to work dynamically, but as stated in a previous comment, for some reason marks will not stack on top a character that has been substituted. And if you're going to generate hundreds of ligatures instead, you might as well use the marks you already put in place to do it right.

>And no, I wrote the hundreds of Sub statements all by hand in the internal editor

Well... here's an example python script that will generate the entire feature file, just run it and copy/paste the output It's online so you don't even have to install anything.

On computer I use unicode/ascii key combinations and custom keymap. On smartphones I use these two apps: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.edwardgreve.ipakeyboard

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.husseinelfeky.characterpad

sorry for the very delayed response. I used a Y&C calligraphy marker. Here is the amazon link if you're interested.