Tornosa

BACKGROUND

Tornos is an ancient word root that means to create with circles. This is the essence of Tornosa: its repetition and symmetry make it pleasing to look at but difficult to read, like a baroque decorative design that hides deeper meaning behind its circular glyphs and complex decorations.

The Tornosa font forms a unique cypher alphabet that is perfect for use in fantasy, science fiction, and role-playing game scenarios. It can be used to create illustrations, props, and accessories for RPG campaigns or festivals with fantasy or science fiction themes. It can be used to add depth and complexity to your worldbuilding for your graphic novels, and in the illustrations for the fantasy or science fiction series you are writing.

DESIGN NOTES

1. The core of the font is the circle. Consonants and consonant combinations are represented by letters composed of one or more circles, and may have ascenders or descenders. The only exception is H, which is a simple vertical stroke. There is no distinction between uppercase and lowercase letters.

2. Vowels are written as accents on the preceding consonant. In settings where isolated “floating” accents might be confusing or overlooked, there is an option to attach vowels to a “placeholder” letter in words that begin with vowels, or when a vowel appears in isolation.

3. Tornosa supports an extensive range of accented letters in order to support the dozens of non-English languages that use the Latin alphabet. Most accents resemble their standard Latin alphabet shapes, although some of them have been modified specifically so that they will not be easily confused with vowels.

4. Punctuation is vertically centered to add to the overall symmetry of the aesthetic in Tornosa. For the same reason, marks that normally are followed by a space (e.g. period, comma, colon, semicolon, question mark, exclamation point) have space added to the left of the mark so that they appear “centered” between words.

5. Letter-like symbols either look like their standard Latin alphabet counterparts, or they have been created based on design principles that make them consistent with Tornosa lettering. For example: the dollar sign is the Tornosa letter “S” with a vertical line through it, the copyright symbol is a small Tornosa letter “c” with a circle around it, the Yen symbol is the Tornosa letter Y with two horizontal strokes through it, and so on.

OPENTYPE FEATURES

Consonant pairs and vowel-vowel combinations are implemented as OpenType required ligatures. Most programs allow you to activate OpenType required ligatures, or activate them by default.

The placeholder character associated with isolated vowels or vowels at the beginning for words are implemented using the corresponding positional forms features in OpenType. Many applications do not have this feature activated by default. You may need to go into the character settings, find the OpenType features, and change the “Positional Forms” feature from “General” to “Automatic” to get the placeholder to appear.

Some applications do not let you use OpenType positional forms. We have implemented a "work-around" using the discretionary ligatures feature. If you activate discretionary ligatures, the character combination SPACE+(vowel) will be displayed with the placeholder character. This is not a perfect substitute (vowels at the start of a new line are not affected); however, it is a reasonable workaround for most contexts if you are unable to use OpenType positional forms.