I’ve been trying to figure out how to create a handwriting font for my comic strip. FCP is the third program I’m trying. I haven’t been successful with the other two.
Unfortunately, the tutorial that comes with Font Creator assumes you already know a lot of stuff and is confusing. It doesn’t adequately explain what contours are, where the guidelines should be, and a lot of other stuff that beginners don’t understand.
A good tutorial should assume the reader knows NOTHING. I rarely see a tutorial that follows that rule.
I don’t know a lot of stuff about fonts. I do know what I want to do:
I want to create a capital letters font.
I don’t want to mess with paper, pens and scanners. I want to draw the letters in one of my vector or bitmap paint programs with my Wacom tablet, and import or paste them into FCP. The template that let you draw the alphabet onto paper and scan it is useless to me, because I don’t have or want to use a scanner. It’s much easier to do it with my Wacom. Is there a downloadable template that I can open in a drawing program and fill in the alphabet on my computer? A template in bitmap format, I mean.
Which is better to draw the letters in, a bitmap paint program or a vector drawing program? I mean, which would get better results imported into FCP?
How thick should I draw the letters? (What point size?) I can’t find this info anywhere.
Do I need to contour them and how do I do this?
If anyone can answer these questions or maybe direct me to a tutorial that really assumes you know nothing, really explains contours and guidelines well to a total beginner, and has all the other answers, I’d be very grateful.
Just draw in your vector drawing program (probably that will smooth the contours better) using guidelines to get a consistent size.
Cut and paste via the clipboard into Font Creator’s overview window of a new font. Draw the “A” in your program, copy it to the clipboard, select the A in Font Creator, and paste the clipboard contents. For more control over import graphic save the file to disk as a metafile or bitmap.
Only thing I’m unsure of is whether your application will copy data to the clipboard in Windows Metafile format. FCP can handle bitmaps too: 500x500 pixels is the recommended size.
Scaling of contours after importing can be done on all letters with the glyph transformer if they are too big or too small.
There is no need to worry about contours. FCP will create the contours from the clipboard data. An “O” has two contours, outer one is clockwise and black; inner one is anticlockwise and white.
I just did a quick frreehand sketch in Corel Draw. I copied the filled shape into FCP and it worked just fine. Shapes need to be filled though, a closed shape with a hairline outline and no fill or a white fill didn’t import. However, a closed shape with a thick outline imported OK as two contours.
Well, I have fooled around with FCP a bit (this is my first day trying it), and I have pasted letters into the program. I did not notice FCP automatically contouring them. They did not look contoured to me, they looked like the same letters I drew in my drawing program.
There’s no instruction on how thick to make the letters or anything. I am forced to just guess. I did notice that thinner, 1 pt letters didn’t import well in the program, and thicker (3 pt) ones did. But should I make them even thicker, like 5 or 6 point?
I also tried Corel Draw, but found it very frustrating. None of the fonts I made worked. They usually crashed whatever program I tried to use them in. I think this may have been because Corel puts a zillion nodes around each letter, and this makes the font require too much memory. Removing the nodes seemed way too complicated.
I remember Corel said don’t intersect any lines in your drawings, but I don’t see any mention of that in FCP.
You are saying 500 x 500 pixels is recommended, but I read in the Tutorial that came with FCP that 300 x 300 pixels was recommended.
These are the things that I need explained better. What is contouring and how do I do it? How much to contour? Okay, I think it means giving the letter some depth, but I have no idea how much. And I need a simple way to do it. I don’t speak Bezier.
How big do you make the letters? Is there a template I can download that has the correct guidelines already in place, so I don’t have to figure out how to place them? I noticed in the program that the tutorial said there were two vertical dashed black guidelines and I only saw one. Where is the other?
The tutorial talked about moving the guidelines as needed, but a beginner really needs to be told exactly where to put them. I want the letters to be the right size and not overlap and have good spacing.
Right on Page 13, the Quick Start Tutorial suddenly jumps to “edit a glyph” and starts saying to insert contours, without explaining what contours are, how large a contour is needed or anything else.
The PDF manual that comes with FCP explains about contours, but you don’t need to draw any contours. Just draw the letters in your graphics program to fill the space between guidelines that you can use to keep letters roughly the same propertions.
Copy the letter to the clipboard and paste it into the appropriate letter in your new font, in the font overview. Double-click to open the glyph edit window. There will be two contours for a normal A, three for a B, or only one for a C. If the letters are way too small in Font Creator, you may need to zoom out in your drawing program, and draw them the full size of the page. Just keep doing one letter until you figure out the suitable size.
The weight of the stroke is important. I assume that you can vary that in your drawing program. Don’t try to make your font too spindly. Font Creator doesn’t support hinting, so spindly fonts break up at small sizes. Try something more like Odana, Brush script, or Comic Sans rather than Palace Script.
Preview your single letter in Font Creator (F5) to see how it works at the sizes you intend to use it. Then you can decide to increase or decrease the stroke weight before you get too far.
If you look at some threads in the Gallery you can see that beginners are able to get good results with Font Creator. It is not quite as easy as falling off a log, but you can succeed without months of study and struggle.
Adjusting spacing, kerning, line-spacing, etc., is best left until you have mastered the basics of importing an image and scaling it to the right size. There is a lot more to Font Editing than meets the eye. Your thirty-day trial is just about long enough to learn the basics. Believe me, Font Creator is as easy as it gets, and it is a lot cheaper than the other Professional Font Editing packages like Fontlab or Fontographer. (I have used both Fontographer and Corel Draw to create Truetype Fonts, and I have a demo version of Fontlab).
If you want the bare minimum of hassle, just get your font done professionally. There are online services that don’t charge the earth. However, they also don’t deliver the personal satisfaction and attention to detail that creating your own font does.
Thanks Bhikkhu. Well i’m finally starting to get the hang of it. I did as you said and found out that the stroke widths I was using - 3 point, 5 point, even 10 point – were way too skinny. But I’ve solved that problem by drawing with a brush tool and making a good thick line. Now I see what you say about the program making its own contours.
The copy and paste procedure is very easy, and I’m just doing it to the default in the program, didn’t even set up any guidelines. I am having one small problem, though, and have posted a new thread about it.
