@ErwinDenissen : You’re right that it would be best to ask the questions directly in the forum so it remains indexable on search engines and findable for others.
I need three things:
- The best starting point for understanding the UI fully.
- A quick way to set up proportions for letters.
- How do I translate between inches/points and em units. Thank you!
Elaborating on my private message to you. I need to get to grips with the UI of FontCreator. I find the UI a bit unfamiliar - as it should be expected. There are many, many unfamiliar terms, and specifics, that I hardly know where to begin. I have in fact tried to learn more through Glyphs and FontLabs tutorial and sort of reapply those principles in FC. But finding that a bit hard too. I think my autism plays a role here.
I am trying to develop a Tamil font. A few years ago, I reached out to Paul Miller (he developed Munson, a great unbracketed Victorian slab serif), who is part of this forum, to help me with the project. He very graciously helped me, but I unfortunately could not pursue this project due to various personal reasons. The main intent behind the Tamil typeface is to develop a Tamil typeface that could be used in lengthy body text. The idea was to set the Bible in this new typeface, alongside English text on the facing page.
What I would like to be able to do in FC:
I am proposing a proportional system for the Tamil script based on the measure of letter ப’s width. All the other Tamil letter are harmonised in relation to the width of the letter pa. The longest single consonant in Tamil is ண. And working backwards from tens of fonts, ideally, the letter nna with three whorls is 1.2^5 X width of the letter ப. Or, in other words, it is ~2.5 times wider.
So far, I have been able to work in Affinity and set up templates for letter widths. For instance, by setting the width of letter Pa, I can easily derive the width of all other letters quickly. This is possible through Macros/Actions. How would I be able to do this in FC?
Finally, most important of all: I work in Inches for letter widths and Pts for stroke widths. I realise that type design tools use Em value units. How would I able to translate and calibrate it.
