A “please join in” workshop thread of fontmaking

[William]

I am thinking that if might be both interesting and fun to have a workshop thread to explore the idea of making a font using the Microsoft Paint program to produce artwork and only those facilities of FontCreator which are in the Home Edition of FontCreator 5.6. This will hopefully make participation in the workshop open to many people, hopefully all, who wish to participate. If anyone does have problems, please say and hopefully a way of helping can be found. Hopefully the workshop will be of interest to people at various stages of experience.

This thread is being started in the Discussion Forum, because it is less than a tutorial. Beginners are welcome to participate - please note however that this is a workshop thread so may not necessarily be the best way for a beginner to proceed.

In order to get started I have thought out a few ideas.

I am thinking that a place to start is for me to try to produce a blank gif file with colour guidelines and a black locating block. The idea is that a copy of the gif file can then be used to produce another gif, an artwork file, by adding black lines representing some characters such as letters of the alphabet, digits and punctuation.

This gif file can then be imported into one glyph of FontCreator 5.6 and the resulting contours all moved down so that the base of the black locating block is on the base line. All of the other glyphs would then be at the correct vertical position and could be copied to individual cells. Horizontal positioning of a glyph within its cell could be by using the AutoMetrics... facility of FontCreator 5.6.

As the Glyph Transformer is not available in the Home Edition I am thinking in terms of using the Multiplier of the Import Image... facility so as to get the correct size straight off.

I am thinking of making a template gif that is 96 pixels high by 500 pixels wide. The idea is that 32 pixels would be below the base line for descenders and 64 pixels above the base line. Using a value of 32 for the Multiplier should hopefully result in glyphs of the correct size without needing to use the Glyph Transformer: hence the width of only 500 pixels for the template as 32 times 500 is 16000 and that is just within the FontCreator 5.6 workspace.

Anyway, hopefully this workshop thread will be of interest. I will now try to produce a first template file and then upload it.

William Overington

2 March 2009

[William]

I have now produced some template files.

I first produced a bmp file, and then I produced the gif version and the png version each from the bmp version.

I am thinking that using the gif or png version would be best for the workshop as the files are much smaller, though I would like to upload the bmp version as well just in case anyone is using a Windows 98 PC where a gif driver is only available with Paint if it has been made available because some other package has added it in to the system.

Reference, the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paint_(software) web page.

Unfortunately I cannot get the link to work properly as the close parenthesis does not go blue!

However, I got the message "The extension bmp is not allowed." when I tried to upload the bmp file. It is 141 kilobytes.

template001.gif (1.32 KiB) Viewed 4535 times

template001.png (1.04 KiB) Viewed 4537 times

The upper line is for ascenders, the next line down is for capital height, the next line down is for x height, the next line down is for base line and the next line down is for descenders.

I did make a quick test file to make sure that it would all work properly with the coloured guidelines being ignored when imported into FontCreator 5.6 with a Multiplier value of 32. However, it was very roughly drawn so I won't upload that file.

Other template files are possible, with the spacing of ascender height and capital height different, &c. Readers are welcome to make and upload such files if they so choose.

William Overington

2 March 2009

[William]

I have now made a better-drawn test file.

I used Paint at 8x magnification and I drew freehand using the largest round brush tool, except that I produced the lowercase l by a copy and paste of part of the h and then deleting the excess; and I did a little alteration using the pencil tool, mostly for the base of the vertical in the letter a and to delete the excess from the lowercase l.

Here is the file, ready to be imported into FontCreator 5.6. This is only six letters as a test, more could be included in the same template.

letters001.png (2.43 KiB) Viewed 4534 times

William Overington

2 March 2009

[William]

I made a font using the artwork. Actually it had the font name of test and the file name of Font1.ttf, so I have now renamed it as Experimental Venetian 001 and saved as EXPVE001.TTF.

I am uploading it as an attachment. It only has six letters, yet some readers might like to have a look at what I produced. In particular, please note that I changed the metrics on the Format Settings... Metrics panel and that I used Tools AutoMetrics... to put 128 font units each side of each glyph that had been copied into place.

EXPVE001.TTF

(5.72 KiB) Downloaded 468 times

William Overington

2 March 2009