Trying to extend a colour font

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William
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Trying to extend a colour font

Post by William »

On 21 April 2014 I started the following thread.

viewtopic.php?f=10&t=4930

Since that time the old Windows xp computer broke down and I have purchased another computer.

However, earlier today I found the font project artwork001.fcp in my email posts as I had sent myself a copy of the file as an archive backup.

The file was saved from FontCreator 7.5 and I am now using FontCreator 8.0. I mention that in case it might be significant.

I opened the file in FontCreator 8.0 and saved as artwork002.fcp and renamed the project as artwork002 as well.

I did not publish the font as the nine glyphs shown in the diagrams in the original thread are just mapped into the cells for the digits 1 through to 9.

I was thinking of later updating to map them into the Private Use Area, yet this has not yet been done.

At present I am trying to add another colour glyph to the font. It is mapped to the : character at the moment.

It is intended to represent Full name.

The glyph is similar to the glyph for Surname, the difference is that there is a complete hexagon rather than just the top half of a hexagon.

I have got the three monochrome glyphs done; that is, the glyph for monochrome display, with a border, the octagon and the hexagon.

Yet I cannot colorize the octagon to orange and the hexagon to blue and I cannot do the add part to produce the complete colour glyph.

I remember that when I produced the original glyphs that using FontCreator to produce the glyphs was very straightforward, I was just concentrating on the design of the artwork.

I have been looking through the help files but I do not seem to be able to get the program into colour mode.

It is a long time since I made a colour font and I am getting into a bit of a muddle.

So can anyone advise me on this please?

I hope it is just me forgetting how to make a colour font and not an issue over using a later version of FontCreator, but I thought it best to ask just in case there is such an issue.

William Overington

7 April 2016
Bhikkhu Pesala
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Re: Trying to extend a colour font

Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

  1. Display the Palette toolbar
  2. Select a glyph in the overview
  3. Right-click and colourize it to the selected colour
  4. In the glyph edit window, enable Colour mode to edit the colour glyph members, or disable it to edit the glyph contours. All glyph members (of multi-coloured glyphs) must have the same advance width
My FontsReviews: MainTypeFont CreatorHelpFC15 + MT12.0 @ Win 10 64-bit build 19045.2486
William
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Re: Trying to extend a colour font

Post by William »

Bhikkhu Pesala wrote:
  1. Display the Palette toolbar
  2. Select a glyph in the overview
  3. Right-click and colourize it to the selected colour
  4. In the glyph edit window, enable Colour mode to edit the colour glyph members, or disable it to edit the glyph contours. All glyph members (of multi-coloured glyphs) must have the same advance width
Ah, I was trying to select colour mode while in the glyph overview window, rather than in the glyph edit window: I have now colourized the glyphs. I realized that I had accidently colourized the octagon as black and could not change it from the glyph overview window, but once I followed your advice I managed to colour the octagon orange.

Once I had learned from what you advised, I was then able to find the Add... function by right-clicking from within the glyph edit window once I had entered colour mode.

Thank you for your help.

Some readers might like the following two pictures.

They are each made from a Print Screen image, which was then pasted into the Microsoft Paint program and then cropped.

The first picture is with View Glyph Display Mode set to Monochrome and the second picture is with View Glyph Display Mode set to Auto.
glyphs_monochrome.png
glyphs_monochrome.png (41.74 KiB) Viewed 3465 times
glyphs_auto.png
glyphs_auto.png (41.63 KiB) Viewed 3465 times
Some readers may like to note that (for this particular font) the glyph to be displayed in an application program when there is a monochrome display has a line border to the glyph whereas the glyph to be displayed in an application program where there is a colour display does not have a line border.

William
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