Calligraphy question

Question

Could anyone let me know if this could be done using LaTeX? And if so, how do we do that?

enter image description here

Welcome to TeX.sx! Usually, we don't put a greeting or a "thank you" in our posts. While this might seem strange at first, it is not a sign of lack of politeness, but rather part of our trying to keep everything very concise. Accepting and upvoting answers is the preferred way here to say "thank you" to users who helped you. — Marco Daniel, Mar 31 '13 at 09:01
I don't have that much experience with xelatex or lualatex but perhaps if you can download the font, then they can be used through the package fontspec. — hpesoj626, Mar 31 '13 at 09:07
As @hpesoj626 said, if you got the font, it is quite easy to produce something like that with xelatex or laulatex. — Stephan Lukasczyk, Mar 31 '13 at 09:10
As a matter of interest, if you have the name of the font, could you please share it with us? It looks gorgeous! — ienissei, Mar 31 '13 at 09:25
Since you have some responses below that seem to answer your question, please consider marking one of them as ‘Accepted’ by clicking on the tickmark below their vote count (see How do you accept an answer?). This shows which answer helped you most, and it assigns reputation points to the author of the answer (and to you!). It's part of this site's idea to identify good questions and answers through upvotes and acceptance of answers. — Tobi, Apr 08 '13 at 06:09

Tobi · Answer 1 · 2013-03-31T11:44:47.750

21

I don’t think that this image is created by using a digital font. It seems to be hand drawn, since there are so many different forms of the same characters, e.g. compare the very different e, i, m t or s forms:

letters

So the answer to your question is: No it can’t be done with TeX since there is no adequate font for this.

To do something like this, I guess, TeX isn’t the right approche … a vector based image software, like Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator, will do a better job on this … after drawing it in Inkskape one may export the image to TikZ and use this code in a TeX document or simply include an image file (PDF, JPG etc.).

If you find a calligraphy font that looks like you want, it would certanliy be possible to use it with XeTeX, or even PDFLaTeX, but it could be very hard to handle all the ligatures / joins between letters and the positioning so even with a nice font I would rather use Inkscape/Illustrator.

edited Mar 31 '13 at 11:44

answered Mar 31 '13 at 10:47

Tobi

56,353

Well observed. Even the 1st and 5th pink s have different sizes. – Sigur Mar 31 '13 at 12:09
Not only different sizes … the starting (upper) rounding is also different. – Tobi Mar 31 '13 at 12:56
1

@Tobi how did you extract letters from OPs image? – user13107 Mar 31 '13 at 15:08
2

@user13107: Open the image in Photoshop select everything that is black an then move the pencil above the letters so that the selected are (black = all letters) gets colored. Then i copied the colored letter in another new layer and moved the to the bottom. Was this understandable O:-) ? – Tobi Mar 31 '13 at 15:11
@Tobi yes it is :) – user13107 Mar 31 '13 at 16:21
@Tobi Have you looked at the Zapfino font (it is demoed in fontspec's documentation)? Though it is unlikely, it would be possible to create a font with that many variations (Zapfino has 7 or so). They are defined as unicode ligatures, but you can select/switch them by hand if you want. – ienissei Mar 31 '13 at 17:47
@ienissei: I know Zapfino but even though it has different variants of a character it would be nearly impossible to typset all ligatures like in the given example image … that’s the difference between computers and human calligraphs ;-) – Tobi Mar 31 '13 at 19:43
1

I agree it would be difficult to create this image but just wanted to point out that a well-designed calligraphic font will get the joins between letters right. But the spacing in this image goes far beyond just that and definitely is better done in something like Inkscape (preferably) or Gimp. – cfr Mar 02 '14 at 22:47
Well, it could be done with TeX and the help of some drawing packages ... but, of course, it would take ages to get it done ... you mention this, but strictly speaking, "No it can’t be done with TeX since there is no adequate font for this" is not exactly right. =) – Jasper Habicht Jun 27 '23 at 17:42

score 18 · Answer 2 · edited Mar 09 '17 at 17:30

As others have pointed out, you need a calligraphic fonts with such features. One such font is Zapfino. Zapfino has different shapes for the same letter, as seen from the Wikipedia image below that shows different foms of e in the font.

Zapfino

You can use xetex or luatex engine to use this font. You'll have to activate specific font features to get the desired effect. For example, see Chapter XII of ConTeXt - History of LuaTeX manual. Below is an image from the manual (notice the different shapes of p, g, f, and h)

enter image description here

score 4 · Answer 3 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:35

Related to your engine (pdfLateX, LuaLaTeX, XeLaTeX) you have the following options:

PDFLaTeX

Using this engine means that fonts need special handling. Some fonts are available via packages. Documentations like fntguide or fontinst describe the usage of new fonts and the installation. The process isn't simple. The easiest way is the usage of a installed font. A list of fonts are in the Font catalogue which has a separate section about Calligraphy

LuaLaTeX, XeLaTeX

These new engines provide a new implementation of fonts. Every otf-font can be used directly. The simplest way of using such fonts are given by the package fontspec.

More information about these engine are provided here:

Calligraphy question

3 Answers3

PDFLaTeX

LuaLaTeX, XeLaTeX