How to make the font look the same when importing it to FontCreator?

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haliepark
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How to make the font look the same when importing it to FontCreator?

Post by haliepark »

We’re stuck in a technical problem when we tried to import the font project from Adobe Illustrator into FontCreator and eagerly want to get a solution. There are specific number of anchor points in the AI project of our designed font. But after we import the font into FontCreator, we can see more anchor points added unexpectedly. The original typeface looks very smooth in AI project, but these added anchor points cause many sharp angles on the path and it looks rough and uneven on surface. We are afraid that when we make 3D font, these uneven parts will affect the final effect. We wonder whether it is because there’s something wrong with our settings of AI and FontCreator, or there’re some other reasons.Would you please do us a favor?
Bhikkhu Pesala
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Re: How to make the font look the same when importing it to FontCreator?

Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

There will be more nodes as TrueType fonts use a different type of curve to Adobe Illustrator, but the difference in the shape should be negligible.

A sample AI file (archive it to attach it to the forum) will be the quickest way to see if there's a problem.

Which version of FontCreator are you using?
My FontsReviews: MainTypeFont CreatorHelpFC15 + MT12.0 @ Win 10 64-bit build 19045.2486
Erwin Denissen
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Re: How to make the font look the same when importing it to FontCreator?

Post by Erwin Denissen »

Importing into older version of FontCreator had some serious flaws which are solved with FontCreator 9.
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haliepark
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Re: How to make the font look the same when importing it to FontCreator?

Post by haliepark »

Bhikkhu Pesala wrote:There will be more nodes as TrueType fonts use a different type of curve to Adobe Illustrator, but the difference in the shape should be negligible.

A sample AI file (archive it to attach it to the forum) will be the quickest way to see if there's a problem.

Which version of FontCreator are you using?
I'm using FontCreator 9.1. Here you can find my AI and FontCreator file. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxqJIs ... sp=sharing
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MikeW
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Re: How to make the font look the same when importing it to FontCreator?

Post by MikeW »

Import of AI can be funky. Try copy/paste into FC. For instance, using your FC project, I copied and pasted your AI character into another position. Using FC's Test Font, I typed the two characters in AI and overlaid them on the original AI character. The glyph you likely imported is in green. The one I copied and pasted from AI into FC is red. The black one is the original drawn AI glyph.

I zoomed into one of the problem areas to show one problem with the imported outline versus copy/paste. While still not perfect--and there can be glyphs that come out with various oddities, it works generally very well requiring less clean-up.
Capture-000390.png
However, I have found PDFs generally require the least clean-up.

Mike
haliepark
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Joined: Wed Jun 08, 2016 1:47 am

Re: How to make the font look the same when importing it to FontCreator?

Post by haliepark »

MikeW wrote:Import of AI can be funky. Try copy/paste into FC. For instance, using your FC project, I copied and pasted your AI character into another position. Using FC's Test Font, I typed the two characters in AI and overlaid them on the original AI character. The glyph you likely imported is in green. The one I copied and pasted from AI into FC is red. The black one is the original drawn AI glyph.

I zoomed into one of the problem areas to show one problem with the imported outline versus copy/paste. While still not perfect--and there can be glyphs that come out with various oddities, it works generally very well requiring less clean-up.
Capture-000390.png
However, I have found PDFs generally require the least clean-up.

Mike
Would you please record the screen of how you copy and paste? I'm not sure with the operation and hope to follow every step you did. Thank you very much!
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Re: How to make the font look the same when importing it to FontCreator?

Post by Erwin Denissen »

Due to the conversion the number of points will be increased. There is currently not much we can do about it, but the next upcoming major release will contain an optimize feature which will try to reduce the number of points. I've optimized your contour and did end up with around 450 points. The original vector image contains 458 points, so the result is pretty good in my opinion. Especially since FontCreator also fixed the off curve extremes.

The sharp angles you see are due to the fact a glyph outline can only consist of coordinates with whole numbers. To have less rounding errors, you should consider using a higher units per em. Right now the font uses the default 2048 units per em, but in your case 4096 might be better.
upem.png
upem.png (13.52 KiB) Viewed 4897 times
Do let us know if this helps.
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Re: How to make the font look the same when importing it to FontCreator?

Post by MikeW »

For copy/paste, just select the drawn glyph in AI, press ctrl+c keys. Switch to FC, open the glyph you are copying to inside of FC, press ctrl+v.

Mike
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