I’ve just found your forum and wonder if somebody could help me.
I am trying to create my first font. I have traced some cardboard letters, made sure they have good joined up lines and inserted them into FontCreator.
Letters were scanned, resized in Photoshop to 300ppi (longest edge) then I used threshold to get good dark lines and erased any rubbish, and I’m running XP.
Now my problem. In fontcreator the lines are dreadful. There are huge gaps but only in some of the letters, and I don’t know (and can’t figure out how) to join them up. Also, I see in tutes that letters have a red border. I’ve never had that.
I’m wondering if it is the type of letters I’m doing? They are fat one’s, so have a dark line outside and inside but are white in the middle, if you see what I mean??? (I’ll see if I can insert an image). I’m wondering if they should be solid black, and if so, how do I do it?
Ah, good. It worked. So, the letters look fairly good, but not in Fontcreator.
You might do better by increasing the number of pixels to about 500 or by saving as PNG or PCX (lossless formats) instead of JPG. I also got a poor result with the image that you posted above. This glyph should have only four contours, but because the black line is too thin, the image tracing interprets the line as broken.
With this image, I got a much better result. Try it and see. In my experience, bigger is nearly always better, so I use the upper end of the recommended range. If the outline is too big, you can always scale it down after generating it.
Otherwise, leave out the white bits, and add them back using Font Creators Hollow (Outline) Transforation.
I sure hope Bhikkhu Pesala has given you some good advice. If so I would like to use the images from both Lorraine and Bhikkhu Pesala to write about this specific issue here:
Since you’ve managed to improve your import image results, I wonder if you resized your images? If I actually decide to write about this, I need to be sure I’m telling the full story and nothing more.
