I've made a horrible mistake. You should not make the same mistake as me.

[outofstepfontco]

Hello
I made the decision to try using the Free Draw tool and a pen tablet to draw a new hand lettering font.

I then took the results and used anchors and composites to fill out the rest of the glyphs.

When I was ready to publish my font, I started noticing on closer inspection that the edges were incredibly ragged. Optimizing the curves didn't help. There are two functions available when editing points called "Smooth Curves" and "Smooth and Align Curves". These generally don't help significantly either.

The only thing that helps is to essentially delete all square nodes and work with the remaining curves to capture the essence of the glyphs. Then use the Optimize function or Validation to correct all the extrema. It's a long process, essentially weeks of work. I have been at it for hours each night and I still have half of my Simple glyphs left to go.

Do it right the first time: draw your letters in Illustrator. Illustrator's "Smooth" tool allows you to draw over any janky lines with your pen tablet, and it will smooth them out for you.

[Erwin Denissen]

We have made numerous improvements to edit glyph outlines, but sure if you have Illustrator, then that is a good starting point. You can also copy and paste between FontCreator and other vector editing software, so sometimes it helps to use both.