new to font creation and confused about a couple things

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1

Hi. I’m totally new to font creation and this software and I’m having a bit of difficulty figuring a couple things out.

First of all, I’ve made a basic font which works just fine. What I want to do now is have the bold characters be sampled from another, different font which I have also designed. What I am ignorant of is how assign this other font as the bold version of the first.

Secondly, I wanted to italicize the bold version just a tad. I looked in the forum and the manual/help for both of these issues but did not understand how to accomplish either. I tried solving the italics factor by skewing the characters to get them italicized, but for some reason this also enlargened them, which I did not want, so I abandoned that idea. The manual talks about altering the settings in the formant menu, but after playing with the slope and run and the other instructions I did not see any changes in the preview window, so I’m really confused about what that’s even meant to do.

If anyone can help me figure this out I’d greatly appreciate it. Thanks!

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To make a font a bold version, you use the same font family name, but change some settings on Format, Settings. See this page in the online manual. Then, when you run the Autonaming wizard from the tools menu, the wizard will change the appropriate naming fields, so that it becomes “My Font” Bold.

Although you wish to slant the glyphs slightly, you are not making a bold italic version, so you don’t change the Font Style to italic. Setting the style to italic won’t change the glyphs at all, it just tells Windows Applications to use this TTF file when italics is selected. One Font Family may have two, four, or more typestyles.

Changing the italic angle on the Post Tab will just change the angle of the cursor for typing to suit slanted glyphs. To slant the glyphs, you need to use the Transform Toolbar, or it is best to transform all glyphs at once using the Transform Wizard.

I will assume that you’re still using the 30-day trial version, which is the full Professional Edition of FontCreator. If you’re using the Home Version, then you have to skew each Glyph in the Glyph edit Window from the Transform Toolbar.

• In the Overview window, select all of the glyphs that you wish to slant, and copy them to the clipboard. (Not all glyphs should be slanted in italic fonts, e.g. © ¶ + = < > are often best left vertical).
• From the Tools menu, select the Glyph Transformer
• Click on the folder icon to open a script
• Choose one of the Oblique scripts, such as Oblique05 to slant your glyphs by 5º
• Select OK to skew the selected glyphs
• Paste the clipboard contents back in, and undo. Now you can redo/undo to see the before/after effects (there is no undo for transformations but there is for paste).

“for some reason this also enlarged them”

This shouldn’t happen. Do you mean that the spacing increased? If so, then after doing the above, and with the same glyphs still selected, Edit, Paste Special (Control E), and uncheck all options except Glyph Metrics. That will restore the previous advance widths and side-bearings without changing your slanted glyphs.

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Thanks. The tip about properly naming and classifying the font made more sense the way you put it than what I previously read in the manual.

The transforming of the glyphs worked this time too. I didn’t know about those folders with the premade scripts…which is handy…but there must have been something weird going on before, because i tested it a few times using both the premade script and repeating my earlier steps, and this time everything worked perfectly–no unanticipated resizing.

Thank you for the help!