Images to identify mint marks

Hello,
I create this topic to track the idea of being able to post an image to identify a mint marks on coin pages.
Currently, only mint letters can be entered. It's also possible to add symbols like points, stars or hearts, but it is very limited. The idea is to allow images like maple leaves, bees, etc.

Would be useful, I think. A lot of countries use symbols/logos - France and all their former colonies, Netherlands, India, Russia, etc

Depending on Fonts installed you can have an abundance of mint mark symbols....for example

✿❀✱✲❖☽ ☾ ◉○◌◍◎✱✲✳✴✵✶✷✸♔♕☩☪☫ etc. etc.

There are many more like this and could possibly cover any and all mint marks known.

That's a good idea. I have had a look at what is available for French mint marks.
Unicode has character for the bee ? but not torch (actually only an electric torch ?), no wing (I could find only money with wings! ?), no owl (?), no horseshoe (?), not mentioning more complex privy marks.
Another issue might be some slight differences which are not in Unicode (bird facing right or facing left)

So I think using a font can be a good idea, but perhaps it would need to impose a custom font to be able to control the appearance of the characters.

I've had mixed results using custom icon fonts. They're nice in that they save bandwidth but, before you jump right into implementing them, here's a word of warning: They don't work equally well in all browsers. People using the ever non-complaint IE, especially IE9 or older, will have problems with them and you'll really have to do some pretty weird stuff and jump through some hoops to get them semi-working, like put the document into a different mode (can't use edge), refresh the page with javascript after it finishes loading, etc. Plus, unless you know all the symbol you want it to have before-hand, the font would have to change pretty often.

This may or may not be of any help ..

http://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html

There are large sections of available Unicode units that are not being used officially used and are set aside for private use (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas). So technically you can create a font that displays the mint and privy marks. Somewhat specialized and maybe more time than anyone wants to spend creating it. Of course someone would have to have the specialized font installed for the listing to make sense but it could be doable.

Quote: "Xavier"​That's a good idea. I have had a look at what is available for French mint marks.
​Unicode has character for the bee ? but not torch (actually only an electric torch ?), no wing (I could find only money with wings! ?), no owl (?), no horseshoe (?), not mentioning more complex privy marks.
​Another issue might be some slight differences which are not in Unicode (bird facing right or facing left)
​
​So I think using a font can be a good idea, but perhaps it would need to impose a custom font to be able to control the appearance of the characters.

​any that are not available I can happily make if needed, like these. - Torch Wing
Or I can just make them all if I have a list.....

I can make two of each as well if they need to have a reverse facing appearance. As long as I have a way of viewing the mint mark e.g.online image of it on a coin, I can re-create it for the site similar to those above.

This would be helpful, and probably add a line for where to look for the mint mark, it can be very hard to find sometimes.

I look forward to this addition!

Hello,

A few months ago I extracted mint mark from coin pics in order to illustrate a Numisdoc article I am writing.

Here they are some of them:


They are
30 pixels high
between 0.9 (torch) and 1.3 kb (bee)
100% quality .jpg file - (the bee saved with a quality of 75% is 700 b ---> )

The software used:

• Photo to Cartoon - to merge some colors for less details (background) and split other ones for more details where it's necessary
  
• Vector Magic - to convert bitmap images into vector images and easily remove the background.
  
• IrfanView - to convert to grayscale, resize the pics and save to .jpg or .png files.
  

It took less than 3 minutes to transform each of them starting from a sharp pic.

If there is a source file with all mintmarks saved by name (no number for better finding) and sorted by country (horses might not be the same in every country) where each referee (or coin page writer) could pick up the ones they need to complete the files, I think it would also be a good solution.

With sharp pics I could extract all the needed mint marks...

Could anyone make an angelface mintmark? (http://www.ebay.com/itm/Austrian-Netherlands-Leopold-II-1791-b-Liard-Oord-NGC-MS63-BN-Brussels-KM-52-/252117432286?hash=item3ab35eb7de) I'm revamping Austrian Netherlands catalog.

Hows this?

That's great!

Here are the other two I need:
Lion: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Austrian-Netherlands-1752-2-Escalins-Bruges-Mint-Lion-Scarce-KM-16-EF-5010-/311303462729?hash=item487b21df49
Hand: http://www.ebay.com/itm/1754-Austrian-Netherlands-Maria-Theresa-Ducaton-in-gVF-toned-KM8-/331658557846?hash=item4d3863f996
Thank you so much! The catalog will be so great!

Here you go.

Quote: "Fluke"​Here you go.
​
​

​I like this better, l think it's more clear.

Time to bump up a worthy thread! I've been experimenting with a few different methods to create single-colored mintmark images, which maybe could be converted to TrueType and a custom font. Here is an idea based on the lion mintmark (using my "most top secret patented process"):

We saw some French, Belgian and German symbols (missing French dolphin, horseshoe and more recent privy marks in France and Belgian privy marks for modern coinage). Quite nice... Next: Netherlands mintmark and joint privy marks? Crowned M and its Mexican derivative with the ring instead of the crown? Greek mintmark? Finnish version of the Lion? And there may have other mintmarks to extract later...

Quote: "redsmithstudios"​

Quote: "Fluke"​Here you go.
​​
​​

​​I like this better, l think it's more clear.

​Agreed... cropping the mint marks out makes them less recognizable.

Hello,

I started something related to this feature. Following the addition of the mint field on coin pages (see the discussion), I added the possibility to add a picture associated to each mint. See the 10 rubles coin for an example with Russian mints.

This feature still has 3 main limitations:

• Mints in the list of years/variants are still represented by letters or symbols, not by pictures. Readers should refer to the "Mints" section to see the images.
  
• Pictures are directly associated to the mints, not to the coins. The picture will show on all the coins of a given mint, even if some coins have the mint represented in a different way or not represented at all.
  
• There can be at most 1 picture per mint. So, if the mintmark changed along the time or from one coin to another, this feature will not work.
  

The idea is to be able to show images at least in the simple cases, knowing it won't work for all the mints.

You may request to associate a picture to a mint by opening a ticket on the forum Numista catalogue: "Request about mints".

Thank you very much, Xavier!

Great feature!

I think for this to become usable for Mints with several different drawing marks, we should have in the drop-down list a breakdown of the mintmarks. For Paris, e.g.:

Paris (Leopard, Rottiers de Montaleau 1791)
Paris (Cornucopia, Rottiers de Montaleau 1793-1795)
Paris (Rooster, Charles Pierre de l'Espine 1821)
...etc

I think the graphics proposed by Fluke would work much better. For the Russian Mark, this would look like this:

I think this would help a lot with consistency (always Black on white background, same size, format, maybe .svg etc)

I have a book called "Muenzzeichen aus aller Welt" that could help for this task:


Best
strato

Hello.
Is there a list of mints already entered (as a reference base)?
And of course, I would like to remind that we have already done some of the work for linking to the mints, this could be contributed.
Mint marks - https://en.numista.com/forum/topic58084.html
Fil sur les ateliers monétaires - https://fr.numista.com/forum/topic58071.html

Quote: "Xavier"​​

• Mints in the list of years/variants are still represented by letters or symbols, not by pictures. Readers should refer to the "Mints" section to see the images.
  ​
  

​It seems that for the search function, we should not change letters or symbols to images.

Pfft, it seems that Numista is catching up on me. I have been working on a site regarding these marks for years. Here is a list of mints on my site:
https://markyourcoin.weebly.com/mint-marks.html

Regardless to say that I love this feature, eventhough it would probably make my work for the last decade or so (on and off, not constantly) obsolete...

Quote: "Xavier"​​This feature still has 3 main limitations:
​

• Mints in the list of years/variants are still represented by letters or symbols, not by pictures. Readers should refer to the "Mints" section to see the images.
  ​
  
• Pictures are directly associated to the mints, not to the coins. The picture will show on all the coins of a given mint, even if some coins have the mint represented in a different way or not represented at all.
  ​
  
• There can be at most 1 picture per mint. So, if the mintmark changed along the time or from one coin to another, this feature will not work.
  ​
  

​The second and third limitations are solved :

• A mint can have several associated mintmark pictures
  
• When updating a coin, you can choose between no picture or any of the pictures associated to the mint.
  

Quote: "stratocaster"For Paris, e.g.:
​
​Paris (Leopard, Rottiers de Montaleau 1791)
​Paris (Cornucopia, Rottiers de Montaleau 1793-1795)
​Paris (Rooster, Charles Pierre de l'Espine 1821)
​...etc

For the moment, this apply only to mintmarks, not other kinds of privy marks (e.g. mint director).
​

Quote: "stratocaster"​I think the graphics proposed by Fluke would work much better. For the Russian Mark, this would look like this:
​
​I think this would help a lot with consistency (always Black on white background, same size, format, maybe .svg etc)

Black on white (or transparent) background looks great.​
SVG is probably a good format for that. Sams size might be tricky, since mintmarks don't all have the same width/height ratio and the same size of letters inside the mintmark.

I'm setting this request as "implemented", as I believe the functionality is now usable as-is. As mentioned by Cyrillius, completely replacing the letters by pictures raises some new challenges, so I believe the current implementation is a good compromise.