When you love letters, every letter is a love letter
Intro
This workshop is the first of the Plotterstation serie 2026.
For this episode we focused on the so called single line fonts with a love letter entry. Not only because the workshop took place on Valentine's Day, but also because we are forever haunted by its slogan title «When you love letters, every letter is a love letter». Participants brought their favorite fonts files. From those files we revisited the typographic contours through a series of scripts and steps to find their shaking spines (ductus or central line).
While we worked with fonts, this was not a workshop about type design rather an encounter with the tangibility of letterforms, pens and algorithmic processing.
A kind of introduction to rafting on the river in the heart of our glyphs throughout a set of software pieces.
The workshop also included a writing exercise in which everyone was invited to compose a sentence or short love letter to [current, future, past] lovers, friends, favorite glyphs, summer lake, collective, picture, preferred useless object or simply to oneself. 📳🫦💖🔥📎🔄💐🌀💌
For the font singelinification, we mainly used Skelefont. For the single line font tuning FontForge. Inkscape allowed us to compose with the svg fonts the Hershey font extension.
Agenda
10:00 - Introduction of OSP and plotter workshops - Visit of the space - Plotter demo
10:30 - Skelefont script introduction and explanation - Running the script
Lunch break
14:30 - Splitting in groups and swaping half way 1_ Font tweaking from outline to single line - Inkscape installation - Script running - Fontforge manual kerning adjustements 2_ Writing workshop with different methodologies - Hand writing without computers - Patchwork style using existing texts from books on the table - Picking quotes from a jar
16:00 - Plotting! - On paper, t-shirt, tissue, silken farbric
Ressources
Books on the writing table
Correspondance amoureuse - Natalie Barney, Liane de Pougy
Goudous, où êtes-vous ? - ouvrage collectif
Anthologie Douteuses (2010—2020) - Élodie Petit, Marguerin Le Louvier
Hopeless to love you - Hysterie Collective
Correspondance 1923-1941 - Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf
Amiga Me For U - Manon Michèle
A Queer Year of Love Letters - Nat Pyper
Documentation
Skelefont install
Installing Skelefont on Mac seems difficult due to library and tool dependencies.
For Linux, you can follow the README of the Skelefont repo
Because we have different Linux distributions and encountered difficulties in the installation of Autotrace, here are some advices.
On Manjaro
To install Imagemagick
sudo pacman -S imagemagick
To install Autotrace
sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel
puis
yay -S autotrace-git
On Ubuntu
"sudo apt-get install autotrace" wasn't working so we followed this link and then also installed autopoint package
On both
We changed line 52 of the skelefont.py just to have the default non-thick version from parser.add_argument(“--stroke”, help="Creates a non-expanded stroke font", action=argparse. BooleanOptionalAction) to parser.add_argument(“--stroke”, help="Creates a non-expanded stroke font", action="store_true")
Funded by FWB