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Fontographer 5 + Illustrator, trying to edit an exisiting font

hobbsy83's picture
Posted by hobbsy83 in
10 May 2011 — 2:25pm

Hello all.

This might make me sound a bit simple, but I'm a complete beginner with Fontographer (I only installed it today)

Basically I've taken an existing font and made all my tweaks in Illustrator (Upper and lower case, bold and light) I've then converted the existing font into a ttf and opened it in Fontographer.

Now all I want to do is transfer my characters from Illustrator into Fontographer and have them exactly match the size/baseline etc, I haven't changed the proportions of the font in Illustrator so I'm hoping that I won't have to mess with the kerning. But When I paste them in they are huge and I'm struggling with the scale tool and lack of rulers/guides. Is there a way of importing an eps, or just replacing a character without having to manually scale each one? Or have I missed something and gone about this all wrong???

Thanks in advance!

Paul

blank
10 May 2011 — 2:45pm
blank's picture

Read the Fontographer manual.

oldnick
10 May 2011 — 3:34pm
oldnick's picture

Set your em square to 2048 for a TTF font, with an Ascender of 2048 and a Descender of 0. Then, in Illustrator, place spacers (here shown as blue lines with a 4 pt. stroke) to match the highest point and lowest point of all the characters in your font. This way, all of your characters will import at the same relative size.

I usually import five to seven characters at a time, delete the spacers, then Clean Up Paths, Correct Path Direction, Remove Overlap, then Cut and Paste into the correct slots.

There's a lot more housekeeping to be done once all of your glyphs are placed, but let's leave that for another day. This ought to get you started on the right track...

hobbsy83
10 May 2011 — 10:47pm
hobbsy83's picture

@oldnick - Thanks for the help, this is perfect I really appreciate it.

@Dunwich - I'm an illustrator, not a type designer, and I have no interest in being one. But when I get chance to sit down with a nice cup of tea and a packet of digestive biscuits I will read the 525 page manual, thanks.

oldnick
12 May 2011 — 10:10am
oldnick's picture

After you've imported all of your characters...

  1. Set the sidebearings (for now, choose any arbitrary value, like 24 units right and left);
  2. Determine the numerical value of the baseline;
  3. Select ALL characters and TRANSFORM > MOVE them down (negative value) the same number of units as the above number;
  4. Under FONT INFO > METRICS, set the Descender, as a negative value, to the same number as above;
  5. Use the AUTO function to calculate all other values under METRICS.
  6. Open the original font file and EXPORT Metrics;
  7. Then IMPORT > Metrics into your new file, selecting Kerning and Spacing from the drop-down box.
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