Considering purchasing

[elcelc]

I'm considering purchasing this but have a few questions before I even get into the trial version.

1) For my use, I need to convert some symbols from .shx/.shp format (ancient AutoCAD) to .ttf. After looking over this site it sounds like I really need to scan my old font and trace over it with FC. Am I correct here or is there a more direct way?

2) Regardless, some of my symbols are actually a few sentences combined with a few small graphics and I'm wondering if FC would allow me to do this. Picture a legend on a map with an airplane graphic, the text reading "International Airport" and a line from the text pointing to the graphic. Some of these symbols are moderately complex with seven or eight lines of text and three or four symbols and the whole symbol itself is maybe ten lines tall. Is such a symbol too complex?

3) I really plan on just modifying an existing ttf and replacing the unused gylphs with our symbols. Is this the common approach?

4) Overall, how successful do these FC fonts convert to pdf, MS Word etc?

Thanks

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

1. If you can open the symbols in AutoCad then you should be able to export them as WMF or high resolution bitmaps. That will probably give better results than scanning.

2. I am doubtful whether complex symbols will look good. FC coes not support character hinting, which is needed to make text look good at small sizes. If you're planning on printing these fonts out, the appearance should be OK as hinting is discarded when printing.

3. Modify an existing font only if you have the right to modify it is the usual advice. You can find fonts such as mine or Bitstream Vera, which allow modifications to be made (GNU license). It saves a lot of work and lets you type normal text as well as the special symbols without switching fonts.

4. As long as you do everything right, the fonts will work fine, but as mentioned above fine detail will be lost on screen if they are not hinted. A few words in one character may work OK, but I'm not so sure about a few sentences. There are limits on the number of nodes in one glyph. Can you send me a WMF or high resolution PNG of one of these complex symbols to test?

[elcelc]

Thanks for the quick response.
Try here for one example with a lot of text:

Each letter you see is a regular sized letter but this whole image is "typed" using one instance of alt + xxx. Reason being, the little symbols there need to always be where they are in relation to the text. If this glyph is part of a bigger note and that note is edited later, we don't want the symbols to "float" away.

So I shouldn't just take Windows Arial, rename it, and add a few new symbols?

[Dick Pape]

Welcome elcelc ...

If you can compose it, it can be made into a font in Font Creator.

I have dealt with some exceptionally complicated drawings successfully. Two examples:

Text lines:

Images:

As a point of clarification both of these samples are individual glyphs (in different fonts of course).
DPape

[Dick Pape]

Professional font companies do not like their fonts being reused without permission. There are many examples of font designers "taking action" against such misappropriation. It's not a good thing to do.

With Font Creator, you can build your own font with all your own symbols, characters and personality and at the end be a proud Font Creator!

It is so simple you shouldn't consider starting with someone else's design skeleton.

Your example shows another problem in that the autocad lines are so thin that they disappear at normal font sizes -- a font is a very small character to begin with.



This was from a quickie font where your symbol is approximately 250 points large and still is not readable. Too much white space, not enough black.

If the source can be made thicker, bolder and heavier it can work.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

• I recreated your symbol in PagePlus using my Verajja Regular font (which is derived from Bitstream Vera Sans) condensed to 80%.
• I exported that drawing to a PNG at 1437 x 661 Pixels.
• I imported that into Bitstream Vera Sans, and resized it slightly to fit.
• I assigned the glyph to code-point 60000 in the Private Use Area
• I renamed the font as Elcelc.ttf, ran Autonaming and installed it. Download Font

Below is the symbol in use, mixed with regular text.

CAD Font Test.png (15.96 KiB) Viewed 7617 times

[William]

> 4) Overall, how successful do these FC fonts convert to pdf, MS Word etc?

My more recent fonts are all produced using FontCreator.

They are available as free downloads using links on the following page.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/fonts.htm

You are welcome to produce pdfs and MS Word documents and other documents using them. There are very solid looking letters such as those in Chronicle Text and finer-lined letters such as those in Chronicle.

You might perhaps like to try my Galileo Lettering font. That is a TrueType font produced in this century yet the design derives from a few informal experiments which I tried in the 1960s with a computer-driven graph plotter which had a wet ink drawing pen. The original was intended to give a solid look to letters while using a drawing pen, so maybe the design would be good in a computer-aided design drawing.

The web page also contains links to some pdfs produced using some of the fonts.

Some of my earlier fonts were produced using the Softy program, but they are not linked from that page.

William Overington

14 September 2007

[elcelc]

Wow- after seeing Dick's examples, I shouldn't have to worry about my wimpy little stick figure symbols! Did I say wow already?

The Autocad fonts appear thin because in Autocad, you change the color of the text to control the line weight it will plot as (yellow=0.20mm, red=0.40mm, etc). An infinite level of boldness I suppose. The linewight is something to work with on my end obviously. The other obvious issue I'm seeing for me is remapping 127-159 from our old font.
For the curious: AutoCad uses a .shp file as a shape source file which gets compiled to a .shx that the program can read. The .shp file is just a text file- a Simplex upper case B is coded as:
*66,46,ucb
2,14,8,(-7,-21),1,8,(0,21),090,8,(3,-1),01e,02d,02c,02b,01a,8,(-3,-1),2,098,1,
090,8,(3,-1),01e,02d,03c,02b,01a,8,(-3,-1),098,2,8,(21,0),14,8,(-14,-10),0

Bhikkhu- Thanks for the example. I probably didn't explain very clearly but the text within my symbol should be the same height as the regular text. It seems to work in MSWord nicely but in AutoCad, once the symbol is typed, the width factor of the entire line shrinks greatly.


Thanks all, I'll definitely pick this program up and give it a work-out.