Why a new font instead of further extending Quivira?

There are many reasons:

• I had always planned to make both a serif and a sans-serif font.
• There is a huge trend towards sans-serif as it is more pleasant to read on screens, and even in printing sans-serif is much more common now than it was a decade ago.
• I wanted to experiment with colored glyphs (emoji), but adding them to an existing font would have led to weird inconsistencies.
• It gives me a chance to make some better design choices than in Quivira, e.g.:
  • Different font measurements that work better with anti-aliasing algorithms like ClearType etc.
  • Better use of OpenType features (also using a different toolchain for these now).
  • Re-arrangement of characters in the Private Use Area for better compatibility with other fonts, especially Nishiki-Teki which has always been a huge inspiration.
• It is much easier to extend. MUCH easier. The consistent stroke width alone provides so many opportunities to re-use parts of characters in other places, or even to re-use entire characters. (For comparison: Quivira has different stroke widths for horizontal strokes in letters, vertical strokes in capitals, vertical strokes in small letters, symbols, and sans-serif variants like Lisu and mathematical symbols.)
• The easier and cleaner design also removes anachronisms. Many ancient and/or non-European scripts were never actually used with serifs, e.g. Runes. In a serif font this always raises the question whether to add unusual serifs, or to accept the inconsistency.

Is there a roadmap for future versions?

Not really. I add new characters whenever I have time and feel like it. When there are enough of them to be worth a new version, I release it.

Many characters from Quivira are missing in Catrinity. Are they going to be added?

Mostly yes, but they don󠁧󠁮󠁩󠁲’t necessarily have higher priority than other characters. Catrinity also already contains many characters not found in Quivira.

Are characters copied from Quivira?

Letters from Quivira cannot be used in Catrinity due to the different design. Some of the symbols are, but usually I try to avoid this. You don󠁧󠁮󠁩󠁲’t really need two fonts that look the same, do you?

I need a character that is not included yet. Can you add it?

Feel free to contact me about it, and I’ll see what I can do. Generally, characters that are known to be needed have higher priority than those I think someone might need. Not giving any promises about the timeline though.

What does the name “Catrinity” mean?

Nothing really. Just a random word that doesn’t seem to be a registered trademark, and that’s all I needed.

I contacted you, but didn’t receive a response. Why?

There are severeal possible reasons:

• You omitted or mistyped the e-mail address, so I have no way to contact you.
• You use a GMail address. For some reason, GMail has recently refused around 50% of my answers with various different error messages. Please use a different e-mail provider if possible.
• It may just take a bit longer. I do not always answer on the same day, especially if some research is required.
• Some messages are so short, lacking context, or otherwise so hard to understand that I just don’t know what to write, or can’t even tell if it is just spam (to which I will never answer).