Joachim Breitner

My very first font

Published 2008-11-13 in sections English, Digital World.

For a project of mine I needed the pictograms for man and woman (as also known from toilette doors), in two different sizes, once filled and once as an outline. I coud not find these as a LaTeX symbol nor as a defined unicode character, so I searched the internet. I found some material as vector graphics (EPS), which I was using first, imported into my LaTeX document as images. But it felt wrong to use images for something that’s a symbol in the text.

So I installed fontforge, the apparently usual tool for that, imported the EPS files and with surprisingly reasonable effort created a TrueType font with these nice eight glyphs:

Quite a while ago I wrote here how to use single glyphs from a TrueType font in LaTeX. Based on that I created the neccessary files to use these in LaTex with these commands, in the order of the picture: \Mansym, \mansym, \Womansym, \womansym, \Boysym, \boysym, \Girlsym, \girlsym.

Here are the files: ManPictograms.ttf T1ManPictograms.fd ManPictograms.tfm ManPictograms.enc ManPictograms.sty. If anyone feels like turning them into a more proper LaTeX font package, they are welcome.

Comments

ttf-marvosym has the lady and the man, but without the outline version...



http://www.marvosym.com/MarVoSym_full.png
#1 gurkan (Homepage) am 2008-11-13
Thanks. It would have been strange if these weren’t available at least somewhere – I just didn’t find them.
#2 Joachim Breitner (Homepage) am 2008-11-13
The marvosym man/woman symbols are really bad, unusable. Joachim's are way better ;)
#3 Juan Lucas (Homepage) am 2011-03-05

Have something to say? You can post a comment by sending an e-Mail to me at <mail@joachim-breitner.de>, and I will include it here.