fluxisch-else
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OSP-foundry :: Fluxisch Else
<h1>Fluxisch Else</h1>

<p><a href="http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/foundry/wp-content/uploads/univers_else_023.png"><img alt="Fluxisch Else in use" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-256" height="362" src="iceberg/univers_else_023-600x362.png" title="univers_else_02" width="600"/></a></p>

Fluxisch Else is an experiment, a first attempt to escape the post ’80 era of geometrical purity that is so typical of Postscript vector based font drawing. The shapes of Fluxisch Else were obtained from scanning printed textpages that were optically composed by cheap phototypesetting machines in the sixties and seventies. Some of Fluxisch Else beautiful features are: round angles, floating baselines, erratic kerning.

More precisely in this case, George Maciunas of the Fluxus group used an IBM composer (probably a Selectric typewriter) for most of his own work, and as a former designer, for all Fluxus work. In the 1988 book ‘Fluxus Codex’, kindly given to Pierre Huyghebaert by Sylvie Eyberg, the body text is typeset in a charmingly rounded and dancing Fluxisch that seems to smile playfully at its dry swiss creator. As if it was really tempted, trying to provide a beautiful warm up to this old modernist classical. Along with a free, open and libre version!

A book about contemporary architecture in Wallonia and Brussels provided an ass-kicking opportunity. Three weights were needed. We were not sure that we’ll have the time to finish the fonts in time before having to send the pdf file to the printer. So we laid out the publication with the standard Fluxisch family, and replaced it at the last moment with our version. Suddenly, the 286 pages book jumped out of the ice!

Different scans were assembled by Grégoire Vigneron following different grids. These huge bitmaps were processed with appropriate potrace settings by the Fonzie software* through a .ufo font format as a working format, and an OpenType as output. Some testing and fine-tuning was done by Pierre Marchand, Delphine Platteeuw and Pierre Huyghebaert in FontForge and the font was ready, in a finished state enough to typeset the book. The oblique versions was simply slanted on the fly.

* Fonzie has been develop by Pierre Marchand after a combined push between, among others :
— The need for a convenient way to produce handdrawn fonts for translated version of comics, using Opentype features to automatically switch between different versions of each glyph that try to emulate variations typical of hand drawn lettering. It has been developed and used to produced a lettering font for Manu Arenas via Francois Dispaux* and the Nemoto font for an Eve Deluze*’s lettering job. *These two persons partly financed fonzie’s development.
— An osp installation system called Nancy, deploying the Dingbats Liberation Fest at the gallery My.Monkey in Nancy, France and then at Make-Art Festival in Poitiers, France. This system is semi-automated process of scanning of cardboard-cuted dingbats and inclusion of these shape in a collaborative font. It turn the simplest design into a complicated process involving Fontforge, Subversion, Scribus Python scripter, PoDoFo, glue and good wills…
— The 20 years Pierre Huyghebaert’s desire to be produce more easily 20th century font revivals based on cared vectorization.
— A straightforward version is now enthusiastically used in workshops, starting at the Erg by Ludivine Loiseau and followed by other schools like La Cambre.

In 2016 (probably?), Monotype asked us to change the original name of the font for copyright reasons. We can't say we were enthusiastic, but neither did we have the energy or time to get into a fight over a name that smelled too much of rancid universality anyway. So we ended up settling on a name that was very locally linked to the origin of the images on which we based ourselves. There are traces of this switch in the git history at https://gitlab.constantvzw.org/osp/foundry.fluxisch-else/-/commit/6933eef6add61dec34b7a47b24d81cddf261a303.

Fluxisch Else currently provides the following Unicode coverage:
Basic Latin: U+0020-U+007E – 95 glyphs on 95
Latin-1 Supplement: U+00a0-U+00FF – 95 glyphs on 96
Latin Extended-A U+0100-U+017F – 2 glyphs on 128
General Punctuation U+2000-U+206F – 14 glyphs on 107
Currency Symbols U+20A0-U+20CF – 1 glyphs on 22

Snapshots | iceberg

Inside this repository

Log

 

Alexandre Lerayunwrapped

— Created the skeleton of the repository

Thursday, 24th February 2011 - 19:48

 

ab5tracttalked

— initial import into git

Thursday, 17th March 2011 - 15:03

 

ab5tractbrought out

— following the directory structure more closely; specimens added

Thursday, 17th March 2011 - 16:55

 

Eric Schrijververbalized

— "Blog contents added as README and iceberg"

Saturday, 14th April 2012 - 12:04

 

Eric Schrijverargued

— "remove README because README.html exists"

Thursday, 12th September 2013 - 16:43

 

Eric Schrijverstated

— Squash the skeleton & change the name of the banner image

The image called iceberg/{font_slug}_banner.png will show up as the banner

Saturday, 14th September 2013 - 23:41

 

Stéphanie Vilayphiouexpressed

— Scan of the specimen «The Univers else is yours»

Thursday, 6th April 2017 - 16:06

 

Gabrieldivulged

— test

Monday, 22nd May 2017 - 16:29

 

Gabrieltalked

— Removed all traces of the former U* Else to make it more Fluxisch
-renamed all the folder, files and directories
-updated the font info (still have to handle a link leading to ospublish../../univers-else)
-regenerated font files

Monday, 22nd May 2017 - 16:31

 

Colmadmitted

— move to UFR repo structure

Friday, 20th October 2017 - 16:42

 

Stéphanie Vilayphioulet loose

— webfonts

Friday, 5th October 2018 - 16:22

 

pierrehexposed

— Update README.html with the switch of name explanation

Monday, 29th May 2023 - 12:21

 

pierrehadmitted

— iniitiated

Monday, 29th May 2023 - 12:22

 

pierrehsaid

— (re)initiated the OFL licence

Monday, 29th May 2023 - 12:30