Is there any way to universally change all the stroke weights to make each glyph a bit thinner, without doing each one individually?
Yes, if you have the Professional version. Glyph Transformer, Effects, Thin.
There is no undo, so save your font at each stage. You can apply the effect to the whole font or to selected glyphs. Depending on how much you want to modify the glyphs, you may need to manually adjust some nodes if they cross over. Use the “W” and “Q” shortcut keys to cycle through the nodes in point mode, and move them with the cursor keys or control + cursor keys.
If you don’t have the Professional version or need to make manual adjustments, select just the right nodes with the lassoo tool and move them all together by nudging with the cursor keys.
Thanks Bhikkhu. I will try this. Can this glyph transformer also automatically make a bold font for me from a regular font? If I save a copy of the regular font, then transform the regular font into a bold font and rename it, does that do the trick?
Using Font Creator is a real process of learning and discovery. For example, I was wondering why some of my finished glyphs had thicker strokes than others, when I had used the same sized brush in a graphics program to draw them all.
Well I realized that all the manipulations I am making to the drawing are changing the stroke weight. I try to draw in a 300 x 300 pixel area, but usually the drawing is bigger or smaller than that, and I scale it down or up to fit. Then after I paste it into FC, I often scale it some more.
I didn’t realize that each time I do that, I am changing the stroke weight as well as the height! So now I am trying to draw more precisely and not manipulate so much.
Thanks again.
After several weeks of tinkering with my font, I am still distressed that when I paste hand drawn characters into the glyph window, often the stroke weights of the glyphs I end up with are not uniform, even though I drew them all with the same size brush in a drawing program. Some are noticeably thinner or thicker than others. This is happening even when I don’t manipulate the character size at all.
Can anyone tell me how to use Glyph Transformer to easily and universally make all glyphs the same stroke weight? The instructions are not detailed enough.
Thanks.
Measure the Strokes
After you’ve finished all the resizing, zoom right in to a horizontal stroke, and measure it with the measuring tool.
MeasureStrokes.png
Do the same for a vertical stroke
For many fonts the horizontal stroke weight is thinner than the vertical stroke weight, so the transformation will also need to be less. Diagonal strokes will be somewhere in between.
Then you know exactly how much you need to transform it to match the others. A bold transformation of 16 funits adds 16 funits each side of the stroke, so if it was originally 168 funits, it will be 200 after transformation.
This is the result you should get from the above transformation:
MeasureResult.png
The Thin Diagonal Stroke
Currently, there is no way to control the amount of transformation for thick or thin strokes — only for horizontal or vertical strokes. The thin diagonal stroke is also increased by almost 16 funits each side, where 2 funits might have been more appropriate to match the increase in the thin horizontal stroke.
Thanks, Bhikkhu, though it would be a lot easier if there were a simple transformation you could apply to make all strokes the same weight.
Well, I also just tested my font (a handwriting font) in a comic strip that gets exported to PNG for the web, so it gets anti-aliased, and I’m finding the whole font is too bold. I want it to match my hand lettering stroke weight to look more natural.
So I tried using glyph transformer to make the font thinner. I found that settings of 10 vert and 10 horizontal produced some thinning. But I calculated that I wanted a bit more thinning, so tried settings of 20, 20, 15, 15 and 11, 11, and all of them went way too far with the thinning, making the font much much thinner when I just wanted it a little thinner.
So 10 gives you a slight reduction, but 11 gives you a BIG one. That’s a problem.
Making a font is a lot more complicated than I thought.
Then your stroke weight must be less than 20, say 16, so a thnning of 10 gives you -4, while 11 gives you -6. You should reduce the thinning to prevent contours crossing over.
The illustrated font is the A from Snell Bold BT, which has a thin stroke of 16 and an funits/em value of 2048. Strokes of only 4 or 6 would disappear at normal font sizes without hinting because Windows cannot display any less than one pixel.
I agree that making a font is much harder than most people imagine, but I don’t understand why you’re having so much trouble getting the stroke weights the same without any transformation. It is just a question of not scaling them at all after importing, which should be possible as long as you don’t alter the zoom level when copying from your graphics program, nor while pasting into Font Creator. The proportions should not change. If you need to scale them individually, you must be doing something wrong. If they are all too big or too small, that it easy enough to fix globally later.