Hi I’m a total n00b with font stuff and do not know much although I am not a computer n00b. I’m using FontCreator mostly to modify fonts so they are easier to use in my embroidery.
I recently bought a font (samantha) which has wonderful glyphs but I can’t use them in inkscape or corel draw (I have both) but apparently they work in Illustrator. The only program I DO have that seems to recognize the glyphs is FontCreator but I’m not sure how to get the characters to be usable outside of FontCreator. (too many unusable glyphs to modify to make different fonts)
Can I copy paste the glyphs out of FontCreator since they are vector? I haven’t had luck with copy/paste so far.
Is there any way I can use these hidden glyphs other than making a font out of the ones I want to use.. every time I want to use the font?
If you have CorelDraw X6, it should support OpenType Features. See this video
Welcome to the wonderful world of fonts. You don’t need to edit the fonts, indeed you should not as they are restricted by copyrights. What you need is a software program that supports the OpenType Features. DrawPlus X5 is an inexpensive drawing program that supports OpenType features. Without having the font, I cannot say definitely that it will support all of them, but it should give you access to most of them. There is a free version of DrawPlus, but I no longer recommend it due to the dangers of malware that some users reported. Below is an illustration of one of my own free fonts with and without the OpenType features enabled in DrawPlus X5.
Taking screen shots one letter at a time from the Glyph edit window, after hiding the screen clutter is not practical. I see that an upgrade to CorelDraw X6 is about ten times the price of DrawPlus X5 (not the latest version).
You could also try displaying a word or two in the Preview Toolbar by select the glyphs in the overview, then pressing the “P” shortcut to display them, but that will be an even lower resolution bitmap as the font size in the Preview toolbar is limited.
If you have a pre-X6 version of CorelDraw, you may or may not be able to access the glyphs. And likely some of the below options will utterly fail in versions before the X series anyway. But a couple things…
One, if you have BitStream’s font manager installed, you may be able to access them, copy and paste into a text string. I no longer have a version older than X6 on the computer and so cannot test.
Two, there are several font character viewers that can see all the glyphs and copy to the clipboard. This might also work, but unable to test.
If all else fails, you can download and install Microsoft’s Expression Design. It’s now free. It supports OT features, but does not have any native access to the glyphs. Used in conjunction with either a character map (but not Window’s Character Map utility), or using FontCreator, you can copy and paste the glyphs into Expression Design. Then you can convert to curves (menu Object, Convert Object to Path) that can then be exported as either an SVG or simply as a PDF that then can be used in CD.
I appreciate all the help, I will look into some of those. I downloaded a trial drawx6 to try it out and it’s actually a bit clunky.
Just another newb question. Is there any way to make the glyphs show fully in the window in FontCreator? I actually use this program a lot but haven’t learned some of the basics.
