Ketubah drafting part 4 – fitting to shapes

[hatam_soferet]

Fitting text into shapes, the bane of ketubah artists everywhere.

First thing with funny shapes is to check them out with the officiant. Some officiants are DEAD AGAINST funny shapes – anything that doesn’t have four sides and right-angled corners. Others are okay with it so long as the lines are horizontal and any added words would look obviously wrong.

Today we’re fitting text into an eight-pointed star, and the question I most need to answer is “What size nib? what line height?” (This is one question, today.)

Playing around with my word processor (re-read Part 3 if you’ve forgotten), I can see that if I was using my beloved B nib, with its 9mm lines, this text would occupy 30 lines of 18cm each (for pity’s sake don’t forget the lines for the witnesses, and it’s a good idea to add a line or so’s worth of space just for security). That’s 486cm².

Now I want to work out the area my funny-shaped text actually needs to occupy. If all mathematical formulae fail, you can do it out on squared paper and count the squares, just like we did for GCSE. Make sure you don’t screw up the units. You do remember your high school maths, don’t you?

I like using metric because I hate working in idiotic fractions of inches. Eight-pointed star based on a 4.5-inch square…translate into metric, figure the area… I can’t use the bottom point of the star, because the witnesses have to fit in at the bottom one underneath the other…looks like my area here is 154cm².

Find the length scaling factor. GCSE maths again – when areas are scaled a:A, lengths are scaled √a:√A. My areas are scaled 154:486. 154/486=0.3168, so I can also say my areas are scaled 0.3168:1. So my lengths are scaled √0.3168:√1, that is 0.56:1.

So, to get the line height – if I was using my B nib, I would be using a 9mm line height. The length scaling factor is 0.56, and 0.56*9mm = 5mm, near as dammit. So I need to be using a 5mm line height, and a nib to match.

In my case, that means a quill something less than a millimetre wide, and in your case, well, you’ll figure out what you need to be doing.

I lightly write each line in pencil first, so as to get an idea of how to space the words on the line. Not all the lines, just each line as I get to it, until the last five or ten lines – then I pencil in the whole lot, to make sure that they’ll fit nicely. Sometimes doing this on tracing paper is better, so that you don’t do too much pencil-erasing on the Actual Ketubah. Depends how forgiving your surface is.

Erase the messy pencil lines, draw in a bit of a border, et voilà. Perfect.

So there you go. Now you know how to fit a ketubah text into any shape you like. Enjoy. Send me pictures.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.