🧙 wizpen

A Pigpen cipher-inspired font, originally created for a D&D wizard spellbook. Unlike Pigpen, characters in this font can share vertical and horizontal strokes while still being readable.

Copying a spell into your spellbook involves reproducing the basic form of the spell, then deciphering the unique system of notation used by the wizard who wrote it (5E PHB, p. 114)

You can use a package like microtype to add spacing between characters. Both "expanded" and "compact" examples are shown below. Regardless of which you use, one of my design goals was to allow the font to easily be read once you know the basic scheme.

Note that uppercase A-R are rendered with two dots to mark the center of each letter, and lowercase a-r are rendered with one dot. S-Z and s-z are rendered with no dots, because they would get in the way of the diagonals.

If you don't like the dots, just comment out the dotted and double_dotted lines in the generator script (see "Modifying the font" section below).

Also, 1-9 is just the negative space on A-J, and 0 is the negative space on Z.

Using the provided TTF or OTF

Just download it and install it. It's that easy.

Shoutouts

DMs and brewers at Battlemage Brewery in San Diego, California
dc858 folks (especially ice)
Distractions, Inc for peer review and feedback

Build prereqs

For just building LaTeX documents:

metafont (for rendering the font in TeX)
lualatex (for syntax highlighting important terms in D&D spells)
ruby (for building the metafont definition)

For building the font in TTF and OTF formats:

mf2pt1
fontforge

Building

LaTeX files:

make: Build everything
make clean: Clean everything
make redo: Run make clean and make all
make spellbook or make spellbook-redo: Make the provided example spellbook.

TTF and OTF files:

make font: Build the font into TTF and OTF files. This will take a while.

Using the LaTeX metafont

Create a texmf folder like the one here (or just copy it) and export TEXMFHOME=mytexmf before running pdflatex.

An example document will look like this:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[top=0.125in,bottom=0.125in,left=0.125in,right=0.125in]{geometry}
\usepackage[letterspace=150]{microtype}
\usepackage{setspace}

\usepackage{wizpen}

\begin{document}

{
    % Uncomment the \lsstyle to add a little spacing between symbols
    \Large \wizpenfont \noindent %\lsstyle
    ABCDEFGHI \enspace JKLMNOPQR \enspace STUV \enspace WXYZ \\ \\
}

\end{document}

Example

Check spellbook.tex for spoilers on what all these actually say.

Modifying the font

script/wizpen.rb is how the font gets generated (check the makefile). If you want to modify it, edit that file, and the font will be regenerated at the next make.

That code is pretty messy, but produces the whole font from an algorithm.

License

Licensed under the LaTeX Project Public License: See LICENSE