6-sided Pedal symbol

[benwiggy]

Following on from my posts about a Henle plate, I've redesigned the Pedal 'star' symbol in Sebastian to be six-sided, like Henle's, not eight-sided, like .... well, seemingly every other music font.

I've been getting really good in Affinity Designer at making complex shapes by combining simpler geometric forms, and either adding or subtracting one shape from another.

Here, I've taken a hexagon and some circles, and been able to produce a nice clean, smooth and symmetric form that matches Henle's design perfectly.

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... and here it is, on a page.

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[OCTO]

May be of help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwD5X9RJy0k

[benwiggy]

Ha!. I've been using Affinity Designer to recreate geometric patterns used in Roman, Hellenistic, Christian and Islamic mosaics and architecture - and it's been really instructive in how to produce all kinds of shapes. Lots of logos and other designs use similar techniques -- the old Twitter logo, notably.

[hautbois baryton]

Ben, that's a beautiful glyph. Very nice.

[benwiggy]

Here's the Henle original taken from the plate. It's seen a bit of action...!

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[NorFonts]

Nice glyph Ben!

I actullay use another technique using only one cirlce and a short segment.

1— a circle on the top, a circle in the middle (a bit more larger) and a circle on the bottom, they should be equidistant, only the top and below circles are connected with a segment
2— select all; copy/paste with a rotation of 60 degrees
3— redo step 2
4— redo step 3
5— select the circle in the middle and create some thick parrallel contour, the new generated contour should be reversed
6— cut the new reversed contour, select all, remove averlap, keep selecting all, now apply round corners ( set your desired value maybe 90% roundness)
7— now paste back the new reversed contour... that's it!

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Adding some little weight:

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Done in less than 2 minutes.

[benwiggy]

Not sure I understand how you get from your second image onwards. Are you manually applying round corners to the whole thing? Can't believe that took just 2 minutes.

But, yes, there are probably lots of ways of doing it.

Is that in FontLab? I did mine in Affinity, and then pasted in.

[NorFonts]

That was in FL8.... it features an action that does the roundness of the corners and more.

When you make fonts more than 20 years, you can develop the skills of doing things in less than 2 minutes. Would you believe again that I use FL everyday beside my music arranging, teaching and gigs? sometimes just for fun, and sometimes 'for fun' becomes a real project!

[benwiggy]

I emailed the chief engraver at Henle. Apparently they used both the 6 and 8 star in their hand engravings. Their digital pages produced by Amadeus software also produce a six-pointed star; but they now use an 8-pointed star and have no plans to change!

Does anyone have Amadeus? Does it use fonts?

[NorFonts]

Did Amadeus Soft use some font called: Bach?