Does anyone have experience that they could share designing cursive fonts?
I now “successfully” designed a couple of printed fonts, but my attempts at cursive have been dismal. The letters are all over the place and do not match up well at all. It appear that cursive fonts are quite a bit more involved, but some pointers would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance for your help.
fontmaster said:
It appear that cursive fonts are quite a bit more involved
Yes.
I use the word ‘ligature’ simply to mean ‘joining stroke’.
If you look at some cursive fonts by opening them in FCP and open Edit windows for a few glyphs you will see that the ligatures can be leading or trailing or both in the same glyph. Look carefully at how the bearing-margin lines ‘cut through’ the glyph. On my computer I have Mistral and Brush Script MS fonts. They are good examples to study. You now have a lot of help in getting the ligatures at the right angles to join by using diagonal guide lines. When you look at a test piece, at high magnification, in Font → Test, you will see where the joins are as one glyph joins with another. This is particularly noticeable in Mistral.
Hope this gives you a starting point.
Joe.
Thanks for the advice. I am quite aware, now moreso, that this will take lots of work. But I guess the old attage is true, the more work you put into something, the more you get out of it.
With working with fonts - as with most things in life - it takes 20% of the work to get 80% of the results. It’s that last 20% that takes 80% of the time!!
Agian, thanks for your advice. I look forward to spending hours upon hours to perfect my font!
I’ve not done any font design, but from what I’ve heard:
It is easier to scan a font and make “small” corrections than to try and design the font on the computer. Seeing cursive fonts where each glyph has hundreds of points it is obviously not done by hand. Even making minor “corrections” to these can be tedious.
If I were to try to design a font, I would start with one that looks like what I have in mind to give me a starting framework. Some of the overall issues would be fixed before I began. And of course, copying fonts is a well-practiced main stream font design approach.
Seeing that some (most) fonts are fraught with errors, font designers aren’t too careful probably because it takes too darn long.
Hope you have patience, lots of time and some good luck!
I’ve seen the approach where someone puts in two horizontal lines that correspond to where two consecutive letters will have joining strokes. You put the left and right side bearing for each character right where the joiner intersects with that space, then cut off anything outside the side bearings. That way each consecutive character will start where the last one ended. The only problem is that the begining and end of a word can look a bit goofy, but aparently, you can tweak the placing of where you want each character to start and end so it comes out good.
Unfortunately, I’m doing this on another computer, so I can’t show you how it works. I hope the description is good enough.
I hope this image shows what I was talking about and what vanisaac explained:
The right-hand image shows the result of typing ‘g’ then ‘h’ in an application.
vanisaac also said:
but aparently, you can tweak the placing of where you want each character to start and end so it comes out good
I’m interested to know more about this. Have you any further information?
Joe.
Using your “g” as an example (btw, great example of what I was talking about there 
) You could decide that you want the approach into your “g” to be longer, so you could cut off some of the “tail” and move it to the approach on the g. Obviously, once you modify one character like this, every character would have to be changed in the same way, so the current “h”, which does not have much of a tail, would limit your ability in this particular font. I’ve also seen examples (I wish I could remember where), where the tail and approach overlap considerably, but you only notice at the beginning and end of words, where there is no overlap and the long tail can show. This is also a way of getting a good fit - notice how the “h” and “g” above have a little white gap between the combining tail and approach.