The Include outines option of FontCreator for a new font

Discuss FontCreator here, please do not post support requests, feature requests, or bug reports!
Post Reply
William
Top Typographer
Top Typographer
Posts: 2038
Joined: Tue Sep 14, 2004 6:41 pm
Location: Worcestershire, England
Contact:

The Include outines option of FontCreator for a new font

Post by William »

FontCreator 5.6 provides the option Include outlines so that a new font generated using File New... has designs for some glyphs included in the font.

In fact I have not often used that option. The reason for that is that I wanted my glyph designs to be all my own artwork not using copies of artwork by someone else. I accept and indeed think it a good idea that the Include outlines option is included: it may well be helpful to many users and indeed has the very useful attribute of having glyph designs for smart quotes provided so as to help beginners. I had also noted that outlines for some mathematical symbols are included.

Until yesterday, when I had another look at the collection of glyphs provided by the Include outlines option, I had not realized that the outlines which are provided by the Include outlines option offer a very useful way to learn about composite glyphs for producing accented characters as a composite of a base character and an accent.

I have at times experimented with composite glyphs yet never seemed to get very far with them. My published fonts all have accented characters made as individual glyphs, though I have copied and pasted contours from cell to cell when producing the glyph artwork using FontCreator.

So this morning I am hoping to try an experiment using a new font using the Include options glyph in the hope of learning more about composite glyphs. I am documenting what I do as I proceed, though this is with the benefit of a little experience gained yesterday.

Start a new font using FontCreator 5.6 using the Include outlines option. Use Composites Experiment 001 as the font name and COEXP001.TTF as the file name.

Use Tools AutoNaming... to set the date in the format that I prefer, namely day month year.

There appears to be at least thirteen included outines for accents.

I do not know if the following is rather too general and that I should be selecting only accented characters, or whether it will just act where a glyphs is specified as composite and do no harm where a glyph is not specified as composite.

Edit Select Incomplete

Edit Complete Composites

It appears to cause no harm, though there are a few composite glyphs as a bonus which I had not expected, such as 1/2 and an inverted question mark.

There are now a lot of cells with just an accent yet with no letter. However, there are four accented characters for lowercase i. This is because they are built from dotless i and a design for dotless i is an included outline.

Try to add a design for lowercase e. First note the value of the y coordinate of the lowest point of the accents for e acute, e grave and e circumflex. So make the top of the e at or just below 1024 font units. (This value is because I have the grid on and set at 256 font unit intervals and the accents are above 1024 font units: incidentally I mention that I have the grid displayed in orange, which, for me, makes the grid useful yet unobtrusive).

Now try using the glyph transformer to add other European characters using the Eastern Europe.xml script.

I am impressed by the way that a j circumflex, used in Esperanto, is produced using a dotless j.

An interesting experiment which has helped me learn more about using composite glyphs.

William Overington

14 November 2008
Post Reply