Hi everyone
I have been using Illustrator to achieve text effects that aren’t available through the Glyph Transformer (for example, Roughen). I have been finding it very challenging to move fonts in and out of Illustrator without losing characters / bearings / character position, while matching heights, etc.
What is the best way to move your fonts back and forth to and from Illustrator without losing important information or having to use mathematics to re-scale the characters? Is there an open-source repository for advanced Glyph Transformer scripts that would allow us to apply Illustrator effects inside FontCreator?
First of all, make sure you are running FontCreator 11.
Design your font as an OpenType font with CFF based outlines, as those use cubic curves which are also what is used in most vector drawing software.
To copy and paste back and forth to and from most vector editing software without conversion to TrueType based outlines (quadratic bezier curves), you need to set the Outline Format to CFF (PostScript) in the TrueType/OpenType Font Export Settings.
To be honest, I don’t think I’d even be at a point where I’m worrying about that if all my punctuation, spacing modifiers, and combining diacriticals are all out of alignment. The amount of effort involved in getting them back into place isn’t worth the benefit of having a “rough” version of an existing font, for example.
I’m seeing FontSelf may have ability to apply Illustrator effects font-wide, but I will have to do more investigation.
Looking for input from others that generate “rough” fonts, for example. A Glyph Transformer script would rule.
If Illustrator doesn’t store bearing, x-height, or cap height data, how could the Import Vector tool possibly load a vector into the same place inside a glyph as the source font project? Are you assuming I’m saving each individual vector in Illustrator as a new file? Because for fonts with 300 glyphs that exceeds a reasonable workload threshold.
