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Start points
Posted by daverowland in
29 Aug 2012 — 3:28am
29 Aug 2012 — 3:28am
Anybody know with any certainty where startpoints should be located? Does it matter? All I've found through experimentation is that it seems better to have the startpoint at a corner rather than on a curve.
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29 Aug 2012 — 4:56am
I've also found that, plus they need to be blue.
29 Aug 2012 — 8:34am
Technically it can be anywhere, it's just that avoiding curves (or even tangents) is good practice because on a curve you have to ensure smoothness manually.
hhp
29 Aug 2012 — 9:19am
Somebody here (was it Miguel?) said that for historical reasons you should aim to place them so that the previous section (leading into the endpoint) is a straight line, where possible.
30 Aug 2012 — 3:33pm
It's hard to draw a lot of Oo0 that way, but I'll give it a try.
30 Aug 2012 — 3:37pm
Yes, it's not always possible :)
30 Aug 2012 — 9:59pm
So, if it is not always possible, should it ever be required?
31 Aug 2012 — 3:47am
I'm not sure which old font format preferred things that way, or whether wholly curved glyphs posed problems, but I think it's safe to conclude it's not an issue for applications these days. FontLab, however, does sometimes do funny things to start points between curves, so I try to put them at the end of straight sections when possible. I'd be interested to hear others' methods.
31 Aug 2012 — 4:00am
Yeah, for some reason Fontlab seems to treat a start point on a curve as two points, which isn't a problem until you try interpolating between two glyphs where the start point is on a curve in one and not the other. Having said that, I'm struggling to get blend fonts to work very well at all, even when all points, start points and start point order are compatible.
31 Aug 2012 — 5:51pm
FL's blend was written by the Kremlin's astrologer's shrink's Italian cousin Eddie Blendera.
Sometimes when I couldn't stand it anymore, I'd copy one blendend to the background, then copy the other blendend to the foreground, and bash one blendend into the shape of the other from the same friggin contour. That always works.
4 Sep 2012 — 7:10am
One very weird thing about blend fonts is it seems to make a difference which master you put in which box. Blend thin with black yields different results from blend black with thin!