Tip of the Day

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Working in Clean Screen Mode

In the Glyph Edit Window you can press "H" to hide the screen clutter, but did you know that by pressing "Alter H" you can hide it and keep it hidden?



When you want to focus just on the shapes of the glyphs it helps to hide the guidelines, etc.

• Hide the floating toolbars
• Turn off automatic glyph validation to speed up scrolling
• Display the Status line (F4)
• Hide the screen clutter (Alter H).
• Click back in the window to hide the menu
• You can still select contours with the shortcut keys or mouse. The status line shows the position should you need it.
• Scroll through the glyphs with Alter left and right

Do you have any more simple tips?

[Dave Crosby]

Ctrl H does the same thing. Press H again to restore everything.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

To Quickly Remove Guidelines:

Double-click on the ruler and clear all, or select individual guidelines and click on delete.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Looking for Somewhere to Keep Notes?

If you find you have to keep opening a text file in notepad, e.g., to refer to Panose weight data, paste the text into the Font Test window. Then it will always be close to hand with a press of the F5 key:

Font Test.png (62.38 KiB) Viewed 6285 times

For smaller blocks of text, such as the results of calculations, use the Preview Toolbar:

Preview Toolbar.png (4.74 KiB) Viewed 6271 times

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Bookmarking Your Place

What were you doing on Tuesday 5th June at 5:07 am GMT?

Get into the habit of saving your current workplace with Control + Shift + zero. When you resume work, Control + zero will zero in on the glyph you were editing last week when the harsh realities of life interfered with your hobby.

See also: Using Bookmarks

Location of Guidelines.dat and Bookmarks.txt

These have now moved from the Program's installation directory to its Application data directory:

C:\Documents and Settings\<User Name>\Application Data\FontCreator

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Adjusting Geometric Centre

When FontCreator completes composites it aligns diacritics on the horizontal geometric centre of a glyph. The circumflex accent will be centred on the Capital E, for example. Acute accent is offset to the right so that its one third point is centred on the base glyph, while grave accent is offset to the left.

On some glyphs, like the capital E illustrated below, this looks off centre because the visual centre is a long way from the geometric centre.

Single Node Contour.png (213 Bytes) Viewed 6239 times

To adjust the geometric centre of the capital E so that it aligns with its visual centre one can add a single node contour. (Single node, or two node contours won't print. We can use them at the design stage and remove them later by using the font validation wizard). Insert a rectangle from the Drawing toolbar, select three nodes and delete them to leave a single node contour.



Move the single node contour until the geometric centre aligns with the visual centre. You can see where the geometric centre is from the middle handles when all contours are selected. Drag a vertical guideline to where you think the visual centre should be. This is best done with no bearing lines in view to distract you.

Now, when you use Complete Composites, the accents will be aligned optically rather than geometrically, and all other accents over or under the Capital E will be correctly aligned too, because the geometric centre has moved. One can also move the geometric centre of accents in exactly the same way by adding a single node contour.

     

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Designing Ligatures

Select the ligatures in the glyph overview and press shortcut "P" to show them in the Preview Toolbar. Type a few letters to make words and repeat the whole words after the ligatures. Resize the Preview Toolbar so that pairs of words line up like this:



Now, you can easily see if the spacing and kerning are right, and if the design works aesthetically or not in a line of text.

Here is the same text with Pali Italic.



You can tell at once that I forgot to adjust the right side-bearings on the Qu ligature after moving the "u" to join the "Q," and in the fi after moving the i to join the f.

The contour joining the st and ct is too heavy. It should be more like the contour joining the ck.

The sp ligature uses the "p" and "s" from the regular type style, not the italic typestyle Oh well! Back to the drawing board.

After Making a Few Corrections

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Skewing Contours

Sometimes you don't know the precise angle to use in the Glyph Transform wizard, or the amount of skew to use on the Transform Toolbar. The easiest method is to use the skew handles. Select a contour or several contours with marquee or shift select, and click the selection again to get the skew and rotate handles when you mouse over the selection handles. Carefully grab the skew handle and skew the selection as you wish.



After skewing glyphs you will see some off-curve extreme points highlighted by the validation toolbar.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Making a Smooth Bracket

Delete any excess nodes at the bracket, leaving only three on-curve nodes, or add an on-curve node if needed. Drag the middle node of the three horizontally in line with the third node until the first node shows as red. The red nodes indicate that an on-curve node is redundant because it is in a straight line with another on-curve node.



Press the "F" shortcut to convert the middle node to an off-curve node.



Now the Validation Toolbar shows a different error — the off-curve node is an off-curve extreme. Click the "Add on-curve extremes" button on the validation toolbar to correct this problem.



The result is a smoothly curving bracket.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Making Stencil Fonts

Stage 1
Draw a rectangle, select all and centre align middle.



Stage 2



Stage 3
Drag select with the mouse to select the three offcuts, and press delete.


Stage 4
The end result.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Simplify Insert Characters Dialogue

This one is a hack, so use at your own risk. Updated for Unicode 6.0 and FontCreator 6.2. I have also added separate blocks for code-point blocks in the Private Use Area that are used by CompositeData.xml and some Transform scripts.

It applies primarily to the Professional Edition as the Home Edition doesn't have the Insert Character dialogue, but the data is also used by the Add Mappings dialogue.

Make a backup copy of blocks.txt in the Unicode subdirectory of FontCreator's installation directory. Edit the original file to remove any lines referring to blocks that you know you will never need, or comment them out with a # sign. Unless you intend to make Asian fonts or CJK fonts, all of those lines can go, and do you really want to make Runes? You may end up with a list like this or even shorter:

0000..007F; Basic Latin
0080..00FF; Latin-1 Supplement
0100..017F; Latin Extended-A
0180..024F; Latin Extended-B
0250..02AF; IPA Extensions
02B0..02FF; Spacing Modifier Letters
0300..036F; Combining Diacritical Marks
0370..03FF; Greek and Coptic
1E00..1EFF; Latin Extended Additional
1F00..1FFF; Greek Extended
2000..206F; General Punctuation
2070..209F; Superscripts and Subscripts
20A0..20CF; Currency Symbols
2100..214F; Letterlike Symbols
2150..218F; Number Forms
2190..21FF; Arrows
2200..22FF; Mathematical Operators
2300..23FF; Miscellaneous Technical
2460..24FF; Enclosed Alphanumerics
25A0..25FF; Geometric Shapes
2600..26FF; Miscellaneous Symbols
2700..27BF; Dingbats
E000..E2AF; PUA Stacking Diacritics
E2B0..EA9F; PUA Small Capitals
EAA0..EB9F; PUA Ordinals
EBA0..EC6F; PUA Medieval Ligatures
EC70..EEBF; PUA Stacking Fractions
EEC0..F00F; PUA Discretionary Ligatures
F010..F8FF; PUA Not used by CompositesData.xml
FB00..FB4F; Alphabetic Presentation Forms
1F300..1F5FF; Miscellaneous Symbols And Pictographs
1F600..1F64F; Emoticons
1F680..1F6FF; Transport And Map Symbols

Insert Characters Dialogue.png (25.6 KiB) Viewed 4554 times

Reload FontCreator and go to Insert Character. It is now much quicker to scroll through the blocks with the next/previous block buttons, and the droplist is much shorter. I attach my copy of Blocks.txt which contains all of the original lines, but with many of them commented out. To add a code block, remove the #, to remove one, insert a # at the start of a line.

Make a backup of your edited version too — if you update FontCreator blocks.txt will be overwritten.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Changing Straight Lines to Curves

• First add a node between the start and end of the line with the shortcut "a"
• Convert this on-curve node to an off-curve node with the shortcut "f"
• Select one or more nodes with marquee select (dragging with the mouse), or with the Lasso tool
• Drag all of the selected nodes with the mouse to reshape the curve or curves together. Hold the shift key while dragging to restrain the movement to horizontal or vertical.
• Use the keyboard cursor keys to move the nodes a precise distance: up/down/left/right to move by 10 funits. Hold down the Ctrl key to move by 1 funit, or the Shift key to move by 100 funits

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Working With Kerning Text Files

If you have spent some time adding kerning values to fonts, you probably already know about exporting and importing Kerning Values as a text file from the Manual Kerning Dialogue. These text files are saved in the %AppData% folder for FontCreator.



However, you can also edit these text files in Notepad to copy and paste whole groups of kerning values between files to save work. For example, I added a whole lot of kerning pairs for stacking fractions such as 1/16" to 61/64" to one font. After exporting the kerning pairs as a text file for that font, I copied and pasted the kerning pairs for the stacking fractions to the kerning pairs text file for another font. Then I reimported the kerning pairs for the second font to save adding the same group of kerning pairs again.

Screen Shot of Kerning Pairs in Notepad

Stacking Fractions Kerning Pairs.png (35.02 KiB) Viewed 1644 times

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Copy/Paste to Create Composites

If you have the Professional Edition, Complete Composites can be used to create many composites, for example to create subscripts from superscripts. However, if the glyphs are not mapped, for example, if you want to create denominators in the Private Use Area from superscripts, or if you're using the Home Edition, then Complete Composites won't be an option.

However, composite glyphs can be created by selecting the glyph members in the glyph overview, copying them to the clipboard, then pasting them into the empty glyph where you wish to create the composite glyph.

To speed up the process of creating all ten denominators from the ten superscripts, copy them all at once, paste them all into the target glyph, then delete those you don't need.

Step One
Select all ten superscript glyphs in the glyph overview using Shift + Click, and Ctrl + Click. They will probably be in the order: 2,3,1,0,4,6,7,8,9 if the font is sorted in the standard order.

Step Two
Insert ten empty glyphs at the end of the font. Denominators intended for use with OpenType Features don't need to be mapped. Or, you can map them to code-points in the Private Use Area.

Open the first empty glyph and paste the ten superscripts from the clipboard. You will see a confused mess of glyphs like this:

Pasted Composite Glyph Members.png (10.66 KiB) Viewed 741 times

Step Three

To select the superscript zero cycle through the composite glyph members using the "w" shortcut key — the zero, which is the fourth on the clipboard will be selected with three presses of the shortcut key. Holding shift, press the down cursor about five times to separate the selected glyph from the group. If you get the wrong one at first, try again until the target glyph is separated from the group and in the right position on the baseline like this:

Target Glyph Member.png (13.53 KiB) Viewed 741 times

Step Four

Use the shortcut key "Ctrl T" to invert the selection to get this:

Invert Selection.png (13.76 KiB) Viewed 741 times

Press the delete key to delete the selected glyphs, and use the shortcut Alt Right cursor to move to the next glyph. Paste the clipboard contents again (Ctrl V), and repeat the process for the next denominator.

Using composites instead of simple glyphs reduces the size of the TrueType font file and makes the font easier to edit. If you later decide that the superscripts need to be bolder, for example, you only need to edit the superscripts, for the subscripts and denominators to be updated too.

[Dave Crosby]

Cool! THANKS!