Earlier this morning I tried producing an italic version of my Kern Deco font.
I had not produced an italic font previously, so I have learned a lot along the way.
Here are links to the results.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/KERNDECI.TTF
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/kerndecoexamples_italic.PDF
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/initiative_italic.PDF
I started with a copy of the Kern Deco font. I used the Glyph Transformer on all of the glyphs at once. I had tried a few experiments before.
Here is a transcript from my notes file which I produced as I went along.
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Try to make an Italic version.
Start by saving a copy of KERNDECO.TTF as KERNDECI.TTF.
Try to make an Italic by using the Glyph Transformer Italic feature.
Use 26.5700 degrees as that is the closest to arctan(0.5) that can be achieved.
Tick the checkbox for “Set font subfamily and font design to italic”.
Leave the other checkbox unchecked. It says “Preserve side bearings”.
Use Autonaming. Keep the name as Kern Deco. Note how the italic information is included elsewhere.
Validation produces lots of errors about off-curve extreme coordinates.
Validate with automated correction.
The font is now validated.
Look through the kerning. It looks good. The existing kerns seem to have converted well.
Are any additional kerning pairs needed? VE is not needed.
Try installing the font.
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In fact I took far longer looking through the glyphs and studying the kerning than I took to produce the font.
I calculated the angle using Microsoft Calculator in View Scientific mode. If one ticks the Inv checkbox before clicking the tan button, then the arctangent is calculated rather than the tangent.
I chose the value of 0.5 for the argument of the tangent on the basis that I wanted the right-side of the A of the regular font to become vertical in the italic font. That implied sending the top point of the A 1024 font units to the right. The top point of the A is 2048 font units above the base line. 1024 divided by 2048 is 0.5. I was not entirely sure that that would produce the effect of the right-side of the A becoming vertical in the italic font, but it did.
In producing the kerndecoexamples_italic.PDF document I did need to take care that the right-hand side letter in the heading on each of the two pages was not clipped. Indeed, on both pages of the source document for the kerndecoexamples_italic.PDF document I needed to widen the text frame on the page and then centre it again. The original non-italic version had text frames set to the pre-set margins suggested by the particular desktop publishing package being used (Serif PagePlus 10). However, adding the word ITALIC to the heading made the space used for the text wider. It was just circumstance that made that an issue in the title lines, it could have happened with any line or lines in a collection of lines of text. These two example pdfs do both use text which is centred. If using the font with whatever formatting settings, please take particular care to make sure that there is no right-side clipping of the overhanging part of the right-most glyph in each line. Hopefully this will not be too big a problem as the font is likely to be used mostly as a display font rather than for a block of text.
William Overington
24 October 2007