When I import designs the resulting glyphs may be aligned at or close to 0,0. When it’s not at 0,0, I have to manually move them. Is there a Transform function or other trick to align glyphs to a consistent X,Y position?
90-90.jpg
There’s the Glyph Transform Wizard “Move” function, of course, to move all glyphs by a fixed x,y value.
However, with your complex glyphs I suspect it would be quicker to draw a pixel (or L cross-hair) on the bottom left corner of the originals at the point where you want the origin to be. Then delete the tiny contour that will be generated when the drawings are imported.
If the aim is to have all glyphs start at 0,0, then I suspect you have some stray pixels outside of the drawing area, so cleaning up or cropping the scan first should fix that.
Thanks for the fast response.
I don’t know why some images don’t end up at 0.0 as I don’t see stray pixels like shown on the sample. The original doesn’t show them either.
When there is editing to do in FC, such as removing “noise” or correcting off curve extremes, a feature to position the glyphs like AutoMetrics would be nice to have for the whole font.
Do you have an example image that doesn’t import at 0,0 ? Perhaps we can work out why it doesn’t.
You can set both of the side-bearings to any desired value using the Transform toolbar or Glyph transformer, but setting the y offset from the baseline is not possible AFAIK.
Anyway, if a drawing has a curved bottom, or a descending stroke, it should be positioned with a negative vertical offset to align optically with other flat-bottomed glyphs.
Hello Bhikkhu Pesala
In the attachments I have 10 EPS files (stars) and a test font.
I Imported the 10 EPS star files (Drag & Drop). You can see the offset in each - every one was not at 0,0.
I imported them again in the second half of the font and made positioning corrections and Changed Directions.
Dick
You moved the goal-posts — no wonder they don’t align to the origin.
Your first illustration looks like a bitmap, not a vector image. The rules for import are different. Bitmaps will align the lowest and left-most pixel to the origin. Vector images have the origin at the bottom left corner of the page.
Draw your vectors aligned to the bottom left corner of the page, and they will import aligned to the origin in FontCreator.
I changed from jpg to EPS in order to get small images that ended up “wrong”. Since I don’t draw, I don’t know the difference between bitmaps and vector images anyway! I don’t particularly worry about the format of the input as I focus on the FC side of things. With import, FC ends up with a usable image or it is thrown away and go to the next image.
My acceptance threshold is what happens in FC.
Thanks, Bhikkhu Pesala, you have expanded my understanding and therefore expectations!
Is there an automated way to align the images as you did in your zip?
But, between badly aligned EPS images straight from conversion due to input format and other images which have been edited out of position, there is still a need to align glyphs, en masse, in FC!
Dick
The next comping update of FontCreator will contain a Position transform feature.
Great. That was fast. Maybe I should look at other items on my wish list! Like color fonts… Dick
Not gonna happen. The TrueType and OpenType specifications do not allow for color. Those features must be handled by markup. If you want a multi-colored glyph - like old titling figures - you need to specify multiple glyphs, each one to take a particular color in the character, then create an OpenType multiple substitution that will replace the single character with multiple overlapping glyphs, then hand color each glyph to the appropriate color on an ad hoc basis.
-Van
We’ve just released a new version that contains the promised Position transform feature.
Updated. All seems to work as expected. Not sure what I will use it for, but clearly useful for some tasks.
Works for me too. Thanks High-Logic.