FontStruct

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metalfoot
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Joined: Sat Jul 14, 2007 2:47 pm

FontStruct

Post by metalfoot »

Has anyone here played with the new FontStruct tool? It's not going to replace FCP or any of the other packages, but for a fun way to play with building blocks to make basic fonts, it's a hoot. Check it out at Fontstruct!
William
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Post by William »

Thank you for an interesting link.

It is great fun. I am designing a font and thus far have 42 characters, namely all of the basic lowercase, together with some capitals and punctuation and a few accented characters, namely è, é and ê.

I have downloaded the various versions of the font and studied them using FontCreator and tested them and installed them using FontCreator.

As some readers know I like Venetian Roman style fonts, so I have tried to see how far I can get in trying to produce a FontStruct font in Venetian Roman style. Some things can be done well, others not as far as I can tell. For example, a lowercase h can have nice serifs at the base and a nice sloping serif at the top of a long ascender. However, the o is almost square as in a pixel font and the e has not got a sloping line in the middle (is there a proper term for that line?). However, the x has come out well, quite unlike a pixel font, with forty-five degree lines and nice serifs. Yet the v is not so good at present. Yet I am pleased with the p with a long descender and rounded serifs at the base and a slanting serif at the top.

I found that the process is similar to writing a poem in that the very constraints of the rules lead to the production of something which would not have been produced had those constraints not been there.

William Overington

15 April 2008
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Post by William »

I have found that FontCreator can be used to design possible new cells designs for FontStruct.

With the font that I am designing, my latest working version being named Poetry005, I am using fourteen cells as ascender height, twelve cells as capitals height, six cells as x height and eight cells as descender depth.

Having opened the font in FontCreator I found that if I use Tools Grid Options... and check the Show Grid checkbox and set the grid size to 64 font units, that the grid matches the cells of the FontStruct facility. (Some readers might like to know that I use an orange colour for the grid lines (red=244, green=209, blue=11) and that I usually have the grid size set at 256 font units. I use the solid option for Line style.)

However, for studying the Poetry005 font I have the grid size set at 64 font units. Magnifying the view a little, the contents of the original FontStruct cells is displayed on the screen within the FontCreator grid.

Thinking about the desire to design a better v for the font, I have realized that I can try to design that better v using FontCreator and that with the grid settings as mentioned above, I can try to work out what designs of FontStruct cells would be needed to implement that design: such cell designs could then be suggested to the owners of the FontStruct facility.

There would need to be a balance between suggesting enough new cell designs to produce additional effective results and suggesting as few new cell designs as possible so that the number of new cell designs remains reasonable.

William Overington

15 April 2008
metalfoot
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Joined: Sat Jul 14, 2007 2:47 pm

Post by metalfoot »

And it works very well the other way; use FontStruct to create your basic font design then bring the TTF file over to FCP to do tweaking and kerning and such.
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Post by William »

Some readers might like to have a look at a pdf produced using a font which I designed and produced using the FontStruct facility.

I downloaded Poetry008.ttf from the FontStruct facility and produced Poetry version 0.08 in POETRY.TTF using FontCreator.

There are no major changes to the artwork and no changes at all in the font metrics in going from Poetry008.ttf to POETRY.TTF. Starting with a copy of Poetry008.ttf, FontCreator 5.6 indicated that a lot of glyphs had problems. These were mostly redundant points and use of the Fix detected problems facility of FontCreator removed most of the problems.

Problems remained with a few glyphs. These were resolved manually. In some a point needed moving by one font unit so that problems about unknown direction were resolved. There were also two single point contours, each coincident with a point in another contour of the same glyph. However, FontCreator showed the place in red, so correcting the problem was straightforward.

Here is a link to the pdf document.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/p ... 8_test.pdf

William Overington

18 April 2008
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Post by William »

There is some new news about FontStruct.

http://fontstruct.fontshop.com/news/200 ... hree-weeks

William Overington

24 April 2008
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Post by William »

I have found that FontCreator can be used to design possible new cells designs for FontStruct.
I have designed some possible new cell designs for suggestion for consideration for possible inclusion in FontStruct.

I have encoded the designs as A .. P and a .. p in the following font, which is named Some Cells.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/CELLSOME.TTF

For convenience of trying out the possible new cell designs, a space is included and a solid square is encoded as an exclamation mark.

I tried the designs out using Microsoft WordPad with the Some Cells font used at 24 point.

For example, I and A on a line and then space and C and K on the next line produced an angled line.

William Overington

30 April 2008
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Post by William »

I have now added to the web another font of possible new cell designs for suggestion for consideration for possible inclusion in FontStruct.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/CELLMORE.TTF

This is a font named Some More Cells.

Here is some test data for use with the font.


!
A
a

bB!

c
C
!

!Dd

!
E
e

fF!

g
G
!

!Hh

FontCreator was extremely useful in producing the designs. I added three extra glyph places, unmapped, at the end of the font. In the first of those I added a single contour of the shape that I wanted, as if from two cells each of 1024 font units square one above the other. I then copied that design to the other two extra glyphs. I then drew an overlaying rectangle over the upper half of one and an overlaying rectangle over the lower half of the other. Use of Select All, Edit Join Contours Exclusion and deleting of other contours produced the desired contours. The upper one was copied to A and moved down by 1024 font units and the lower one was copied to a. Both were then scaled by 200% around the point (0,0) so as to produce the final results for A and a. The glyphs for B .. H and b .. h were then produced using the same processes as were used for the Some Cells font.

The three extra glyphs are left in the font in case some readers want to study them.

William Overington

30 April 2008
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Post by William »

I have found that the following page has a screencast introducing FontStruct.

http://fontstruct.fontshop.com/news/200 ... screencast

It runs for 9 minutes 57 seconds.

William Overington

13 May 2008
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Post by William »

Some readers may like to have a look at a pdf produced using a later version of a font which I designed and produced using the FontStruct facility. The additional cell designs now available in the FontStruct facility have allowed me to improve greatly the designs of some of the glyphs.

I downloaded Poetry011.ttf from the FontStruct facility and produced Poetry version 0.11 in POETRY.TTF using FontCreator by adapting version 0.08 of POETRY.TTF. This was achieved by copying and pasting the changed glyphs from Poetry011.ttf and then achieving validation using FontCreator.

The glyphs displayed in the pdf which I changed are as follows.

K R V X Y Z e k v é è ê

The font also includes the twelve accented characters needed for Esperanto. The redesigned circumflex accent has greatly improved their look as previously the circumflex accent seemed too heavy.

Here is a link to the pdf document.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/p ... 1_test.pdf

William Overington

21 June 2008
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Re: FontStruct

Post by William »

Some readers might like to know of some recent changes to the FontStruct facility.

One can now choose the width of the space character oneself and one can adjust the width of individual characters.

http://fontstruct.fontshop.com/news/200 ... shortcuts/

William Overington

6 February 2009
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