TL;DR

Where I share an extraction of Some Time Later to SVG, with a few changes.

You know when you need to do some very repetitive task and you have that epiphany moment like… I can automate it!. Well, think twice.

For a little side project I was interested into getting individual letters from the font Some Time Later as SVG files. It’s 26 uppercase letters, plus 26 lowercase letters, plus 10 digits. It’s 62 total images and yes, 62 is greater than 5 so it’s a candidate for automation, right?

It would probably had taken me a hour or so to do all of them. Instead I went through the rabbit hole, studied how to evaluate the bounding box of SVG paths, wrote way too much about it, coded horrible code to get the job done… and I eventually did, much before one month later. Success!

After working a bit with Inkscape to transform letters into individual paths, I did some adaptation to a few glyphs:

• make uppercase i, digit 1 and lowercase L appear different
• add an internal marker to digit 0 and make both lowercase and uppercase o unambiguous
• turn lowercase Q into a rotated lowercase B, because I like it better

This is what I ended up with:

If you want the individual letters… here they are.

I don’t know if I’ll ever share the code used to extract the individual letters. It’s way too big and… I’m not proud of it 🙄