I’m working on having seven weights for some of my fonts. A lot of transformations!
My Hebrew glyphs have thicker strokes than the Latin. Some ‘compact’ glyphs such as
number sign, registered, copyright, asterisk have much narrower strokes.
Some glyphs are very small such as superscripts, ord masc etc.
These groups of glyphs require different ‘thin’ and ‘bold’ transformations.
Selecting each group by hand is tedious and error prone. Is there any way to
automate this even to a small degree?
Mike
This is a serious defect with bold transformation (and some others). It would be better to have the transformation work on a percentage of the stroke weight rather than a fixed value. Erwin already knows this, but I suspect that its not trivial to fix. The work-around if glyphs have High Contrast is very laborious.
Probably the easiest method is to do the transformation in several stages. Say, you want to apply a bold transform of 100 funits horizontally and 20 vertically. Set up a transform of 20 horizontally and 4 vertically (and move -4). Apply the transformation to some glyphs only once or twice, and to other glyphs four times.
Thanks Bhikkhu, Repeated application of a small transformation. I’ll try that.
The other part of my question was about making selections. To make a click on each of say 20 or more glyphs scattered throughout the font
without making mistakes and to do it over and over… Is there any way to avoid this?
Mike
The only way I can think of is to manually sort your font in rows, inserting empty glyphs wherever necessary, using copy and paste special to copy mappings, and all font data.
That will make it much easier to select blocks for making transformations, with click and shift click, or click and drag.
Here is a suggestion. Modify each postscript name by adding a prefix that denotes the name of a group.
Thus a_XXX could be very thin glyphs, b_XXX could be thicker glyphs. There could be a group for each
kind of special transformation treatment. A sort by postscript name would allow for easy manual selection
of a group.
Since I’m deriving all my fonts from a single master font this might be done only once.
I assume that ‘postscript names’ are no longer used by newly developed or up-to-date software.
I am I right in this?
We will add a new transform feature that will allow you to override the range of selected characters. Consequent features will be applied to such new range.
Erwin
Thanks for considering a change to the transform command.
I did not understand your post.
Does this mean that the transformation script would contain a list
of the characters to which the script would be applied?
A range isn’t so good as the target characters tend to be scattered around the font.
That would be great!
Mike
No worries. You’ll get an edit box similar to the one used with insert characters.