Hello everybody,
it’s a good thing, this Font Creator, I have only one problem (besides a bad English): I opened an older font and made a new one by copying the glyphs one by one to standard Unicode positions. I have done nothing more. Testing the new font, I noticed that the contours are significantly less sharp (in MS Word, in the Test Font window of FC5, everywhere) then those of the font from which I copied the glyphs using Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V. I tried all, for example to switch off the grayscale rendering (as it is switched off in the older font), but nothing helps. The contours are not sharp but somewhat blurred.
Could anyone tell me what to do?
When you copy a glyph or modify its contours in any way, hinting information is lost. What you should do is modify the old font to add Unicode mappings to it. You can copy and paste Unicode mappings (e.g. from the New Font template) by using paste special, and unchecking the options to paste Glyph outlines and glyph metrics.
You can add characters to an existing font by using complete composites.
As long as you do not move the composite members, hinting information will not be lost. However, do not scale the composite glyph members. Hinting and scaling combined produce unpredictable results.
Be sure to rename and save the old font before making changes.
I understand, thank you very much. The Paste Special is useful. But in that case, if one wishes to remap an old font, but at the same time add some new glyphs from another font for example, he gets some characters with sharp contours and some with blurred.
Is there a way to give new hinting information to the glyphs of the new font - got by copying of glyphs - in order to sharpen the contours? I tried the Glyph Transformer, but I didn’t get good results.
No, it is not possible to add hinting with Font Creator, nor to copy it from one glyph to another. If composite glyph members are hinted, the composites are also hinted, but one cannot successfully scale hinted composite members.
See this thread for a link to the free VTT tool from Microsoft which can add hints. It is not a trivial task. Font Lab can do it, but it costs a lot more than Font Creator.
Thank you very much for the information and once more thanks for Font Creator.