I’m trying to design a basic comic font using Scanahand 4.5 and Fontcreator Pro 7.5. I ran a 600 dpi font template into Scanahand with conversion settings for Threshold set to “Low” and Filter set to “Extreme” to minimize vector points.
The resulting font was then imported into Fontcreator and successfully cleaned by the font validator. But after applying the bold effect using the default settings the font validator spotted a large number of “intersecting coordinates” or “contours with incorrect direction” errors:
The bold typeface is used on the word “POWER” in the above word balloon but it’s barely distinguishable from the regular typeface. If I attempt to increase the bold effect my font explodes with all kinds distortion and point/contour errors.
Is there an automated way to clean the font, or a quick technique to prevent/minimize this from happening instead of having to manually scrub thru point issues whenever I want to create a bold typeface from a Scanahand based font? I don’t have this issue with the italic effect.
There’s not much you can do to avoid this problem with bold transformations. It does take some work to fix these intersecting co-ordinates, but once you have done a few it gets easier.
See the tutorial on Working with Transformations
You can also use the method in this tutorial thread for Reducing Nodes to Smooth Glyphs to remove the intersecting co-ordinates — it retraces the displayed contours to create new ones, which have no errors. Calculate the scale transform that you need to apply after pasting.
Since you have Scanahand, you can try another method that might be quicker.
- Ignore the intersecting co-ordinate errors, and just install the font as a temporary font
- Use the bold version to fill in the Scanahand template in IrfanView or a whatever.
- Run the template through Scanahand to create the bold font style, which should now have no errors
Thanks for the tips Bhikkhu. And wow, I didn’t know that Fontcreator had a built in bitmap tracer. Just ran a test and it works great. That little feature doesn’t appear to be documented in the manual or High-Logic’s website. Had I known that in advance I might’ve skipped purchasing Scanahand altogether, tho it does make font generation quick and easy, at least for a first pass, but it’s almost redundant if not for that. Could’ve saved myself some money there.
Anyway, your tutorial gave me an idea. I can apply a stroke effect around the font in Adobe Illustrator to create a bold typeface, break the text into paths, and paste the resulting vector images into Fontcreator. More accurate than bitmap tracing, but requires a separate vector program.
Still, down the road I’m hoping there are improvements to the bold effect. Creating an italic font takes seconds. Creating a bold font takes hours.
Yes, it’s been on my wish-list for ages. The bold transformation needs to be proportional, i.e. increasing the stroke weights by a percentage, and not by a fixed amount. That might also solve some of the problems with intersection co-ordinates.