I am wondering if there is a way to make a fonts characters less thick. I have a script font that I would like to make thinner. I am not talking about the width of the font, but actually making the strokes less bold. The script is just too heavy looking/too bold. Is this something I can do globally to the font, or do I have to chnage every glyph?
Thank you…Merrill
If you have the trial version or the Professional Version of Font Creator you can use a Glyph Transformation on the entire font or on selected glyphs. Tools, Glyph Transformer, Effects, Thin.
See this Tutorial on Working With Transformations for some tips on using transformations.
There is no undo for Transformations, so copy the glyphs first. Then you can paste them back in, and undo/redo to compare before/after results.
The thin transformation suffers from the same limitations as the bold transformation — that is thin strokes will be made thinner by the same amount as thick strokes. You can, however, apply different transformations to horizontal or vertical strokes. If your script font is like Comic Sans — with even stroke weight — it should work well.
To estimate the value you need to use, zoom right in and measure the width of a typical stroke with the measuring tool. If it is, say, 120 funits you would use a horizontal transformation of 10 funits to reduce it 100 funits (10 off each side). If horizontal strokes were, say, only 50 funits, you would use a vertical transformation of 5 to reudce the weight to 40 funits.
Thank you so much for responding with information on glyph transformation. Yesterday was my first day on Font Creator, so I am learning as I go along.
The font in question, which I want to make thinner, is definitely not an even weight font. It is a fancy script, with very thin and very heavy strokes in each glyph. If I am unable to do what I would like globally, am I able to modify each glyph individually? I assume I can, but also assume this will be difficult and a lot of work. Is there any easy way to do this?
This is my first time using a font program, so I apologize if my questions seem naive,
Thanks, Merrill
There is no easy way. The best I found was this:
- Cut glyphs with the kniife to separate the thin strokes from the thick strokes
- Cut the thin stroke to the clipboard
- Apply a small transformation a few times to the thick stroke
- Paste the thin strokes back into the glyph
- Apply the transformation once to the thin stroke
- Select all and get union of contours to rejoin them
You might find that you only need to do this with the capital letters, in which case it wouldn’t be too laborious. The Glyph Transformation Wizard remembers whatever transformation you did last time, and this custom transformation can also be saved for loading and reuse at a later date.
I have added another tutorial to the Working With Transformations thread to explain in detail how to do this. The same method can be used for Bold Transformations on High Contrast fonts.
Thank you again for your information on changing the weight of a font. Your suggestion on separating the thin and thick parts of the font sounds like a great idea.
I will try everything you said and will let you know how I did.
Thanks again, Merrill
I just wanted to take a minute and thank Bhikkhu Pesala for the help with my questions. The suggestions were excellent and I actually made a beautiful fancy script yesterday. I was able to use the glyph transformer feature and it worked perfecly. So thank you again,
Merrill