Font Forum

In FontCreator 11.5.0.2427 (64-bit):

Using the knife tool to cut any contour in a glyph results in all the contours in the glyph being converted to quadratic. Since this can result in a change in the contours, it is not desired behavior.

In addition, it can also result in an exported font not being truly validated. This can happen because the quadratic contours in the glyph need to be converted to cubic for export (assuming they were cubic in the first place because it was a font with PostScript outlines). If the user doesn't notice and manually change the contours to cubic, they can have validated quadratic outlines in the glyph, and the glyph in the exported font can have points that don't pass validation, but the user will never know if they only work with the FontCreator project file (.fcp), and don't open and validate the exported font.

It looks like almost any manipulation of contours that might change the number of contours (knife, union, intersection, exclusion) will cause any contours selected at the time of the operation to convert from cubic to quadratic, even if the contours are not changed by the operation.

For example, draw a rectangle in an empty glyph, then do a "union" operation. Regardless of the type of contour before the union, after the union it will be quadratic, even though there was no need to change anything to take the "union".

Anything new about this?

No change in FontCreator 12.

Hmm... FontCreator manual says:

"Note: Union, Intersection, Exclusion and Knife only work with contours made out of quadratic Bézier curves. If you use them with cubic curves, FontCreator will convert those contours to quadratic."

So this behavior seems to be intended, and not a bug. However, it's quite annoying when curve type suddenly changes

janndk wrote: ↑Sat Aug 10, 2019 1:41 pmSo this behavior seems to be intended, and not a bug. However, it's quite annoying when curve type suddenly changes

No change in FontCreator 13. It may be easy to fix as convert to cubic is already available on the context menu.

The curve type is shown in the Status line so it is easy enough to check if you know that you may need to look for it. It does not show up in the Font Validator Wizard, presumably because it is valid to mix curves types in the same font. Perhaps a feature request is in order?