Help needed: Digitally recreating a print-only font for personal book archiving/fixing project

[Soul Reaver]

The short version:

I'm trying to find someone who can help me recreate a print-only font digitally so I can create a high-quality archive (and fix) a series of gamebooks.  If you can help, please PM me.

 

The long version:

This is a bit of a long shot, but I'm hoping against hope that someone here will be able to help.

For a long time I've been collecting some out-of-print 80s gamebooks, and I've got a complete collection now.  But I've come to realize that some of these are hard to get hold of nowadays and getting increasingly rarer and more expensive.

In my opinion these books aren't just fun - they have historical value: the people involved are a 'who's-who' of creatives in the budding roleplaying game scene.

Because I wanted to read them myself, read them to my son, was worried about breaking my apparently rare and valuable books, and wanted to make sure they were preserved, after checking to make sure there weren't already any high-quality digital versions available, I purchased a book scanner and scanned all my copies in high quality.

Then I realized I could also incorporate the well-recorded errata of the books by photoshopping in the missing/corrected text, so I could have both 'original', unblemished archives alongside 'fixed' versions even better than the originals.

I have the required fonts to do this for most books and have done so... but near the end of the series, the font used changed to a different one (Monophoto Palatino) and this font does not exist digitally anywhere.  I'd need it in regular, bold, italic and small caps versions.

I've tried to create the font myself but quickly learned I was out of my depth.

I've tried to hire people from Fiverr, but without much success (there was one attempt to do so which started pretty good, but the person did not finish the work, leaving me with a font that still required a lot of revision/fine-tuning).

I've checked via my personal networks and contacts without success.

If anyone here has the ability and willingness to help me out, please PM me.  I've got heaps of reference material available and can provide more on demand, as well as the partially-finished font from Fiverr.

This isn't a commercial venture, it's a passion project of mine, but I can offer a small 'koha' (gift/sign of appreciation) of NZ$200 (what I've been able to justify to myself as how much I could afford to make this happen via Fiverr) to someone who does a good job of this.  I realize that's nowhere near the cost of hiring a professional to do this in most countries, but since I'm not going to make any money off it myself, I'm hoping to find someone who might be willing to do it for the digital archiving cause rather than for profit.

Please PM me if you're interested or want to know more.

[Ralf Herrmann]

What’s the reason not to use other Palatino versions? Do you really care this much about the slight optical differences? Or the flow of text?

[Soul Reaver]

It has to do with the optical difference.  The edits I've been doing to the text should appear seamless amidst the original text, but even to my untrained eye I can spot the difference between the lines I changed and the originals.  The Monophoto Palatino font is thinner and 'taller' than standard Palatino.

 

(It's all the more bothersome because the previous books really do look seamless)

[SapereAude]

There are innumerable variations of "Palatino" available, both commercial (paid) and free. How many have you explored?

 

Can you post an image of one of the passages you have corrected, to illustrate the mismatch about which you are concerned?

[Soul Reaver]

I've tried every Palatino variation I have, and none match this one.

Here's an edited bit of text:

The edited line is the one starting with 'Guignol'

If I display the original text beneath it, you can see the level of mismatch more clearly:

This was never the case with the original 43 books, all of which had text that overlayed near-perfectly, kerning and all.

I don't want to suddenly go from 'perfect' to 'eh, close enough'.  I've been working on this project for a huge amount of time and don't want to fail at this last hurdle.

[Ralf Herrmann]

I gave it a quick try with a Palatino on my system:

No micro-adjustments within the line. Just setting the right size and tracking (+10). 

Looks pretty good to me. 

[Soul Reaver]

Try it with the original text, which I hadn't provided above.  The only text I provided above were edited versions with the line written by me using Palatino (so naturally overlaying it with Palatino will work with the above)

Original, with Monophoto Palatino below:

[Ralf Herrmann]

In this case it would require tracking adjustments within the lines to get here:

 

[Soul Reaver]

Except that this text is clearly too 'short'.  It's most obvious on the taller letters.

[Ralf Herrmann]

Sure, that is expected. But unless both versions are overlaid like this, who will see the difference? 

[Soul Reaver]

I eventually noticed it without having realized it was a different font (I at first thought it was Palatino too, just like all the other books and thought the difference was due just to spacing/size differences, which I at first thought I'd 'fixed' by changing the tracking just like you did) but after a while I noticed that all my edited lines looked more 'fat' and crowded somehow and stood out from the rest of the text no matter what I did to them.  That got me looking into it more closely and realizing the font had changed.  Once you see it you can't unsee it.

It might not be that noticeable if looked at in isolation, but when it's one or two lines sitting in the middle of blocks of texts using a different font the difference becomes more visible in relation to all the surrounding letters.

There are also some issues it creates with the editing, with certain lines becoming very crowded if they are written with the standard Palatino font - the Monophoto Palatino seems more space efficient.

Bottom line is: it's a different font, with a different look.  It's SIMILAR to others, yes, but I've gone through about 50 books with something better than just 'similar' and if possible want the last few (which include some of the best in the series but also are most in need of editing) to be to the same high standard.

It's 100% possible to do, I just need to find someone willing to help me with it.