2. Export the font without making any changes, and note that the file size has grown dramatically if you start with most commercial fonts.
3. Delete the original file, open the exported file, and export it to a new file...again, the file grows.
4. Repeat a few times, and the file suddenly starts to shrink again.
Here's the sizes (in bytes) for a few of these cycles:
Code: Select all
380,496
1,507,376
1,729,616
2,010,092
2,069,016
1,843,876
1,725,720
1,688,916
1,665,168
To avoid some of this, a user could save every font you open as a FontCreator project. The problem with this is that if you just want to make what you think is a small, one-off change, you still need to make sure you create a project, otherwise any new changes will require that you go back to the original source, remember what you did the first time, redo it, then make the new change.
And, creating projects isn't a great solution, either, as the project file is even bigger than the exported font, so now my 180MB of Adobe Font files will expand to take up 930MB (original fonts plus FontCreator project files). Yeah, I know that 1GB isn't much these days, but that's only 2300 fonts...a small collection for many people.
I still don't understand how the size can grow that much even with a curve conversion. Other applications that can import PostScript curves (Adobe Illustrator, etc.) seem to be able to import then export back to PostScript without such a dramatic size increase.
Last, even ignoring the increase in size from the source, what this means is that fonts created from scratch with FontCreator are likely larger than fonts created by other editors, and this is important for things like embedding, installing on portable devices with limited memory. In addition, the outlines are more difficult to render, requiring more memory, which is another issue for many portable devices.