Font Forum

Could you consider having the Import Image facility have a third panel, as well as Image and Glyph please.

The purpose of this panel would be to scale the imported image before the grid to vector processing takes place.

This suggestion arises because of the following phenomenon, which is here explained using the image of text from the following page.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Jenson

The image can be downloaded to local storage.

It can then be imported into FontCreator and the image converted to contours.

The result is not very good.

However, clicking on the image on the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Jenson page leads to the following page, from where a high resolution version of the same image can be downloaded.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Jens ... ertius.png

Importing that image into FontCreator gives much better results.

Now if one opens Microsoft Paint and loads the original image from the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Jenson page and then saves as a file with a different name and then uses Image Stretch/Skew... and stretches by 400% horizontal and by 400% vertical and then saves and then imports that image into FontCreator then the results are much better than from the original image and are indeed closer to the results of using the higher resolution image.

It appears that scaling of the imported image prior to grid to vector processing by FontCreator improves the result.

Could you possibly look into this matter please and, if you think it desirable, add a facility into FontCreator so that the image can be pre-processing scaled as part of the Import Image... facility so that a separate stage using the Microsoft Paint program is not necessary.

Such a facility would be very useful if one is importing images of individual characters as it would remove the need to use the Microsoft Paint stage for each character.

For the example used in the above explanation, a high-resolution version of the image is available, yet a high resolution version is not always available for other texts.

William Overington

3 June 2008

Hi William,

Thanks for the request. I've added it to the to-do list.

I found if you click the image a third and fourth time it gets bigger yet.

I'm using Firefox so a piece of that may not be available to all users.

DPape

Preprocessing the image would help a great deal, but it's simple to do that in a third-party application like IrfanView. One doesn't even need to save the image. Just open the low resolution version in IrfanView, double it two or three times, copy it, and paste it into FontCreator.

The 128 pixel icon gives a much better result than the 32 pixel icon, but the 32 pixel version gives much better results if scaled to 128 pixels before pasting into FontCreator than it does without scaling it first.

This feature request has now been implemented in FontCreator 10.

See this video about the new features.

If the imported bitmap is too small, a warning dialogue appears advising to use a larger image. If none is available, FontCreator can now rescale it by up to 400% prior to tracing the image to create contours. If you need to import multiple small images, the scale factor can be saved as the default settings. The multiplier on the glyph tab of the image import dialogue can be changed to scale the contours after import.