Rounding Corners

[muledalton]

How do I add a fillet to a square or sharp corner of a letter. I would like to round all corners to a soft rounded edge but cannot seem to find an easy way to do it.

Thanks, Darrin

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

A quick way is to zoom in to the desired contour, hide all screen furniture, with Alt H, Alt. Then take a screen shot of the glyph contours with Ctrl + PrintScreen using FastStone Capture 5.3 or a similar free utility. Paste that into FontCreator and delete the existing contour. The corners will be round by 10 funits or so.

This method is not exactly quick, but its easy enough with shortcut keys and the help of the align toolbar, and gives more precise control:

• Shortcut A adds an on-curve node
• Shortcut Q moves to the previous node
• Shortcut W moves to the next node
• Shortcut F converts an on-curve point to an off-curve point
• Shortcut N converts an off-curve point back to an on-curve point
• Up/down/left/right cursors move a node by 10 funits
• Ctrl + Up/down/left/right cursors move a node by 1 funit
• Shift + Up/down/left/right cursors move a node by 100 funits

To soften all four corners on a rectangle, select all four nodes, press shortcut A to add 2 nodes to each edge, marquee select 3 nodes at each corner, and use the Align tool to align them all at the corner — repeat for the other 3 corners. Now start using shortcuts Q, W, up/down/left/right, to move the new nodes to a precise distance from the corner, and f to convert the corner node to an off-curve point.

Have fun learning new tricks!

[Dave Crosby]

The above works well!
Below I converted the right side of a rough oval -single point off-curve sides- to two point off curve sides.
Starting with the circled point,1 A adds a point at mid point, F makes it off-curve, 2 [/color]W advances to the next point, 3 A adds the next point at mid point, F makes it off-curve, 4 Q moves back to the original off curve point, Delete; ready to make the other side match.

RndngTrk.jpg (74 KiB) Viewed 3465 times