Copying Font - Urgent!

[minime]

Hi,

I'm new to Font Creation and am using it to create a new set of font urgently.

These were what I did:

1. I open up mshei.ttf (chinese font) and DINNextLTPro-Regualr.otf fonts.
2. Next, I copy all Upper case and lower case alphabets A-Z of DINNextLTPro-Regualr.otf and paste special (Glyph Outline Data) to mshei.ttf


The chinese fonts worked fine. However, the spacing for alphabets A-Z looks awfully wrong. All the letters are wrongly spaced ramdonly.
Also, the bottom of Lower case alphabets g , j, p , q, y got cut off.

What have I done wrong?


Please advise urgently. Thanks!

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

What have I done wrong?!

For a start you have copied glyphs from a copyrighted font. Definitely not recommended, though it has nothing to do with the spacing problem. First, find another font without license restrictions.

I suspect that the Chinese font is monospaced, and the other font is proporitional.

Which version of FontCreator are you using?

[minime]

Thanks for your prompt reply!

Noted on the copyrighted issue. Thanks.

You are right. The chinese font is monospaced. How do i get around this?

I'm using version 5.5

Cheers!

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

You are right. The chinese font is monospaced. How do i get around this?
m using version 5.5

Copy glyphs from a monospace font.

[minime]

Thanks. Will look for non copyrighted proportional spaced font.

[minime]

Hi there,

I have solved the spacing issue. Thanks.

However, the font looks distorted when displayed on screen.

I am aware of the hinting issue, after reading few threads here. I have tried to convert it to grayscale too but it won't work.

Again, i was trying to copy upper and lower case of A-Z and 0-9 from an english font to replace the upper and lower case A-Z and 0-9 of an chinese font.

Strange thing is that the english font looks goods on it own but became distorted when i merged it with the chinese font.

What else can i do?

Thanks.

[vanisaac]

Hi there,
Strange thing is that the english font looks goods on it own but became distorted when i merged it with the chinese font.

What else can i do?

Nothing. The reason it looks good on its own is because of hinting. You can't copy the hinting into another font for technical reasons, and FCP will strip hinting from any character you alter in a font that does have hinting, because changing the outline of a character breaks the hinting instructions. If you print the text, there will be asbolutely no difference, but screen resolution is bad enough that hinting is needed to get that really crisp look onscreen. Interestingly enough, the English characters are distorted in the original, not the copy; hinting is actually a program that distorts and cheats the font outlines to align to pixels.

Van

[minime]

Thanks for the quick reply.

I learnt something new today. Appreciated it.

Cheers!

[William]

In the particular circumstances of the problem there is perhaps something that you can do that might help.

This is because it seems that any English letters will do as long as they are legible. Is that correct?

It also depends upon how the font is intended to be used.

For example, if you are wanting to use the font on the Windows platform at 12 point or maybe 18 point or 24 point or 36 point or 48 point or 72 point and not at 10 point or 14 point then the following could help.

If each of the glyphs is a whole number multiple of 128 font units wide and both sides of the vertical lines are located horizontally on multiples of 128 font units wide, then better results might well be obtained at point sizes that are multiples of 12 point.

The Microsoft paltform uses 16 pixels for 12 point, 24 pixels for 18 point and so on.

This is a technique that I called mathematical pseudohinting, which does not use hinting at all, yet the glyphs are designed to make the display process easier for the rasteriser so that decisions come out well.

I searched in the forum for pseudohinting earlier this morning and found some links.

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3204

viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1279

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1198

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1120

I seem to remember that there was also another thread where I advised the same solution yet did not put the word pseudohinting in it and the person who had had the problem wrote back to say that it had worked and the font was now much improved. I cannot now find the thread in the archive.

I would mention that I almost always use 2048 as the value for Typo Ascender, Win Ascent and Ascender in my fonts. This has the effect that mathematical pseudohinting also works for horizontal lines. I do not know what would happen if an English alphabet from one of my fonts were copied into a font where Typo Ascender, Win Ascent and Ascender have a lower value.

I hope that this helps.

William Overington

15 June 2011

[vanisaac]

I think the entire point, William, is that they didn't want to have to design the font from scratch. Furthermore, your trick may work, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it depends on the rasterizer, and could quite easily be completely defeated by something as simple as margins measured in centimetres.

[William]

Out of interest, I used the Pixel Polka font in WordPad, make a Print Screen image, then pasted the image into Paint, cut out a section and used that as a new image, then enlarged it by 400% then by 200%, then saved as a png file.

Here is the image.

A part of a Print Screen image from WordPad, enlarged by 800% before saving as a png file.

experiment.png (112.04 KiB) Viewed 10610 times

I also tried the font in PagePlus X3, where there is a margin.

Looking at the result for Pixel Polka at 14 point, it seems that the rasteriser starts afresh for each character as it tries to convert from the contours of the font file to the pixels on the screen.

William Overington

16 June 2011