Hi Galifer, it seems you’re after similar stuff to me. I understood what you were asking straight away, but I have visual-cognitive problems, and can’t focus or read all the issues that followed.
With the Coronavirus keeping us under house arrest, I’m just trying to do something I was keen on years ago, but couldn’t easily download what I needed. I’ve had some graphic design, using Adobe Creative Suite - but now only have Photoshop - which does to some extent even place text on a wavy line - as well as does vertical text.
My wish though is to create a typeface/font from ‘scratch’. I love the Japanese way of combining of scripts - Kanji, kana, and Romaji and have done calligraphy with a brush years ago. My meeting of Japanese here in Australia, inspired me to slope my English handwriting to the left, and more to look like the cursive ‘grass writing’ etc.
My first wish was to make a font of my hand writing. Now, my thing is for vertical Japanese inspired script. I also wish to perhaps add ‘furigana’ to the right, or vowel diacritics, as well as ‘okurigana’ as verb endings and particles etc.
To create a new ‘Earth language’ broader than Esperanto, but limited to mostly Indo-european vocabulary - would be a ‘hobby’ for many years into retirement! But, starting would be great and sharing would be even better.
I found with my visual-cognitive problems that this terrible ‘sans serif’ font everywhere is a great problem, and that pictographic or ideographic material takes my attention, and years later, I still am able to remember how to pronounce the kanji I learnt over thirty years ago. More importantly, it was the meaning that comes immediately to mind. [Sans serif fonts can appear more like '1’s and '0’s - a computer binary code.]
Now, that we can print characters quicker than type Latin letters, or with handwriting, do a quick ‘shorthand’ version of kanji etc. perhaps a ‘fantasy’ font, as done in science-fiction, could be a world language and written language.
Esperanto doesn’t appeal to many. As with serif fonts, there has to be a balance of regularity and ease in language, as well as interesting points. Sanskrit and Devanagari script is more interesting.
I have started with a glyph for ‘five’ and ‘hand’. In Samoan, they use the same word for both, lima, but the kanji for either does not look like a ‘five’ or a ‘hand’, so I’ve redesigned one glyph for both - using three strokes. As with Japanese, each glyph can be pronounced in various ways relating to its use singly or in combination.
The only thing I need, is just a program to ‘type-set’ the various components well, and ‘kerning’ and spacing are necessary, although the kanji part is supposed to be contained in a fixed box size. Smaller ‘kana’ and vowel script/diacritics need to be spaced well for proper aesthetic appeal.
Like a type setter, is there just a method of retrieving my created glyphs and arranging them freehand on a page?
Are these the questions that you are interested in also?