Font Forum

http://www.princessartemis.com/remote/ghandsdg.ttf

Trying not to be shy...hi! Total newbie here!

It's not a complete font, yet, but unless you're going to try to type the fun Latin or Greek letters, it shouldn't matter, all the glyphs that can be typed in using the alt key and the number pad are available.

I know I'm going to have to kern the lowercase i like crazy, but I haven't done it yet. I am having fun learning the program and used a Wacom tablet with Painter to make the font. Sadly, it looks very flimsy at small sizes. I'd love any input anyone might have for me (I plan on buying the program when money's less tight--$50 doesn't seem too evil a price for such a content-rich program and I have this fever induced idea of making more fonts... :) I've actually used .jpgs of my handwriting on my website, so having a font of my writing makes that so much easier.

(And I'll be looking through the support section on how precicely to move the upper and lower lines for ascenders and decenders, since the current version of my handwritten font doesn't reflect how low my decenders go...)

The Preview Toolbar (View, Toolbars) will help in adjusting the left side-bearing and advance width so that less kerning is necessary. I experimented with the lowercase i, but overdid a bit (see below).

The spindly appearance at small sizes is due to lack of hinting information. Font Creator does not currently support hinting, only grayscale rendering, which is used to smooth fonts at small sizes. You can delete the grayscale (gasp) table from Format, Grayscale, but thin lines will then break up altogether. Spindly fonts don't look so good on screen without hinting, though they will be fine when printed.

You could use the Glyph Transformer to make your font a little bolder in one easy stage, but unless it is a lot bolder, it will still appear faint at small sizes.

You will find that GIFs are better than JPEGs for pictures of text. They are both sharper and smaller.

Thanks for the hints (and the reason that my font turns into a pile of pixels if I turn off grayscale at small point sizes).

I'll experiment with the glyph transformer to see if I can get a satisfactory balance between visibility and "I don't write like that!" :) It's actually the right side that concerns me with the lower case i, because it and the j both have dots that are more like accents and I need to space it so the next letter is better lined up with the line instead of the dot (that would also better reflect my handwriting). I understood that kerning was the only way to close up the gap withought making the dot potentially run into the side of say, a k. Like, one of my a's would slip under the dot nicely.

On the .jpg vs. .gif, yeah, I realize the .gifs are smaller and usually less lossy and lack the .jpg artifacts that can really make a font look bad. I'll keep it in mind for future postings here, since it's a good bit more painful to type text into Painter (which can save a virtually lossless .jpg) and they're generaly smaller anyway.

this font could have been immortalized had it not been for an unwise use of robots