I am becoming acquainted with Font Creator by making a simple edit to an existing font … in this case Arial.
I thought I would just add top and bottom horizontal bars on the capital-‘i’ to distinguish it from the lowercase-‘L’ … just for grins.
I added the bars (learned how to do contours) and made it a single glyph (by doing a ‘join’) and, from the editor, it looks fine. However, when I create the font (using the Autonaming wizard) to ‘My Arial’ and then installed the font (all is well so far) … okay, I couldn’t install the font from within FC (needed higher privs to write to registry), so I saved it to the desktop and then Start | Control Panel | Fonts and did an explicit ‘Install’ (hmmm … didn’t need Admin privs to do it outside of FC??).
Anyways, with the font now installed, I could access it from within, say, Word. The problem I encounter is that, for different point sizes, the capital-‘i’ looks different (more bold) on screen. Printing ‘seems’ okay.
I don’t get what’s going on. I kept the width of the vertical bar from the original capital-‘i’ the same and made the added bars the same height as the vertical bar width.
Since I can’t post a JPG of the font image along with this note, I would be glad to pass along the font file if someone would be so kind as to help out.
Overall, I’m pretty psych’d about the tool … I just haven’t built up confidence in how to use it yet.
When you modify a hinted font, part of the hinting goes away. Hinting helps on the computer screen, but makes no difference to printed output. You can read about “Volt” and try to do your own hinting, or pay someone to do it.
So far, most of us don’t want the bother, but Erwin is thinking about adding it.
Thank you very much for the pointers … it seems that I stumbled over a typical ‘new guy’ artifact and that I have some more reading/understanding to do.
The references are excellent and I appreciated the gentle reply.
One quick thought would be to eliminate hinting from the entire font so your new glyph doesn’t stand out among the others. (Format/Tables/Remove hinting.)