Converting a font from Regular to Italic or Bold

[postmac]

I have created a font in Regular font style. Is there any easy way to transform this (automatically or semi automatically) into Italic, Bold and Bold Italic font styles?

[William]

It depends what is meant by italic, bold and bold italic.

One can make an italic font that is really just a "leaning over to the right" version of the original font fairly straightforwardly using the professional version of FontCreator. A true italic, however, needs both the leaning and a redesign of some glyphs as well.

However, I found, when I tried it some time ago, that getting started by producing an italic that is a "leaning over to the right" version of the original font was fun and educational and also produced a font that was useful.

Later I produced a bold and a bold italic.

whiteboard_venetian_four_fonts_test.pdf

testing four fonts at 12 point

(25.95 KiB) Downloaded 1257 times

The following thread may be useful, in particular the sixth and seventh posts in the thread.

viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1989

The Whiteboard Venetian font was made using FontCreator using artwork produced using an experimental web application, and, whilst I hope that that might possibly be interesting reading for some readers for another time, the way that the ordinary Whiteboard Venetian font was produced is not the reason for my mentioning the Whiteboard Venetian font here.

The reason for mentioning the Whiteboard Venetian font here is that I made italic, bold and bold italic versions of the font using FontCreator to process copies of the ordinary Whiteboard Venetian font.

The following threads may also be useful.

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2157

viewtopic.php?f=10&t=2288

I hope that this helps.

William Overington

30 April 2010

----

Please know that the edit was only to correct a spelling error that spell checking did not mention.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

If you're using the Professional Edition of FontCreator, or the Trial edition, its very easy.

From the Tools menu, select Glyph Transformer Wizard … Effects, Italic, Set font subfamily and font design to italic, choose the angle, and the wizard will do the rest.

Some glyphs like | are best designed without a slant, even in an italic type style, so select all the glyphs in the overview, and ctrl click to deselect any such glyphs before running the wizard.

[William]

Reading the above post by Bhikkhu Pesala, I remembered that one of the times that he has helped me was on the topic of the design of an italic font.

Here is the link to that thread.

viewtopic.php?f=36&t=2334

William Overington

30 April 2010

[postmac]

Thank you for the advice. I guess I just have to let a text editor like QuarkExpress do the job for me, unless I want to make an upgrade to the professional version of Font Creator. I'm just to lazy too go trough the same procedure more than once