You are a talented designer and a master of calligraphy. You have learned all the Serif, side bearing (side frame/reserved space) and kerning. Now you have to make your own font (what! You don't know what serif, border and kerning are? Well, before you start to make fonts, you must read all the articles on iLT first! If you really want to succeed, you should try your best to master as much relevant knowledge as possible. If you are not a talented designer or calligraphy master, don't worry, you can still create beautiful fonts-with a little effort, a lot of knowledge and a little inspiration. )
Secret weapon: font editing software
The excellent design, beautiful calligraphy works and profound font knowledge mentioned above still can't let you make fonts. You need to convert your work into a format that the computer can understand, so you need to have an excellent font editing software at hand. These softwares have different functions, different prices and different running platforms. Here are some big names:
Font editing software
This is the software I use to make fonts. To some extent, it has become an industry standard, so it is also very expensive, which costs $649. There is a 30-day free trial version. You can try it before you buy it. Both PC and Mac platforms are available. FontLab Studio is a frequently used software, and I can assure you that it is excellent and its user community is quite popular.
FontForge Basically, whatever FontLab can do, FontForge can do it, and it is free and open source. Because of open source, it is not easy to install FontForge under Windows (Cygwin must be installed first). At the same time, its documentation is not as complete as FontLab. Recently, there is an interesting topic about FontForge in Typophile forum. You can go and see if you decide whether to join the embrace of open source. FontForge can be used for PC, Mac and Linux. If you are a Linux user, FontForge may be your only choice.
Those who are addicted to banknotes can consider DTL FontMaster, which has all the functions of FontLab, even more, but it is quite expensive. FontMaster consists of several different modules, which I think is cool, but also quite scary. Suitable for PC and Mac platforms.
FontCreator is another option, and the price is more approachable than FontLab. But it can only handle fonts in TrueType and OpenType formats-it can't handle Type 1 fonts, and it is only available in Windows versions.
TypeTool is also an entry-level product of FontLab, which is the same level as FontCreator. According to the official, TypeTool is designed for students, font design enthusiasts and professional creative people who occasionally need to create or modify fonts. PC and Mac.
Fontographer font editing software used to be the real king, but it almost disappeared after being sealed for many years because the manufacturer stopped developing it. It was not until FontLab got the source code that an upgraded version on the Mac was released recently. Since its latest updated version shows the date of the late 1990s, I sincerely hope that Fontlab can make a refreshing rewrite of this new version. Its price is only half that of FontLab Studio, but it has not been tried out. Both PC and Mac platforms can run, but at present only Mac users can use the latest version.
The operation process of these softwares is the same, but there are differences in specific details, interfaces, options and capabilities. So you should do some research before buying-download and try some demo versions, listen to users' comments and arguments, and then decide which font editing software is best for you. I heard that some people's practice is to start with TypeTool, first judge whether they really like font design, and then when the limitations of TypeTool really become obstacles, finally upgrade to FontLab Studio.
When you have an excellent font editing software, you can have three different basic processes to create a font.
Method 1: draw on paper.
Tools required:
A good pen
white paper
Ruler (optional)
Scanner scanner
Adobe Photoshop (or other similar image editing software)
Scanning font font scanning software
Font editing software
Do you have artistic talent? Good handwriting? Ok, take a good pen and a dozen pieces of white paper and start writing your letter. Don't neglect the choice of pen. If you want your font to be thick and full, try Sharpied marker. If you want to write pen calligraphy, then show your calligraphy pen set. If you want to make the strokes slender and subtle, choose a sharp and accurate pen to write. Write the words bigger in order to get more details. The height of all letters should be as consistent as possible (you may need to draw a grid on the paper with a pencil first). A good font is a complete set of character sets, so don't miss anything-such as punctuation marks, wavy lines, accents, parentheses and square brackets, and numbers. You may also want to include some rare characters, such as some letters in old English and old European languages. Before you put pen to paper, you can create a new font in font editing software to see which characters are included in the standard alphabet of the font. Some of these characters may be unheard of, but professional typesetters may want to see them in your font.
Scan your beautiful work into Photoshop, and then convert the picture into bitmap format (black and white mode, without grayscale).
Almost. Open your bitmap in FontLab's font scanning software ScanFont. This great little software (FontLab Studio for Mac comes with a set of ScanFont-free for lucky Mac users! ) allows you to import bitmap images and then convert them into characters in fonts. Font editing software only operates on contours, such as basic vector lines used in Illustrator. Software such as scanners and Photoshop only deal with bitmaps. ScanFont is a bridge between these two media formats. After scanning, you can save your fonts in ScanFont, or copy individual characters from ScanFont to FontLab Studio, and start your long, arduous and fun font editing work until it is perfect.
Method 2: Draw with a sketchpad.
Tools required:
Wacom drawing board
Adobe Illustrator
Font editing software
If you have Wacom sketchpad, you can save many of the above steps, because you can draw your fonts directly in vector drawing software, while FontLab Studio supports copying and pasting vector data directly from Adobe Illustrator.
Method 3: Draw directly in font editing software.
Tools required:
mouse
Font editing software
Iron hands and god-like patience.
I once made two fonts, all in FontLab Studio, relying on my mouse, a firm iron hand and a considerable number of undo commands. This method is absolutely feasible, and it can generate more accurate fonts than drawing pictures outside the software and importing them. As you can expect, font editing software contains a large number of tools, which cooperate with each other to complete a series of tasks: these tools can generate perfect lines and curves, and there are wizards to help you align anything with high precision.
Create your own font Ⅱ
The total number of fonts sold in MyFonts.com has exceeded 55,000. The huge number of existing fonts shows that when designing fonts, we have to face almost unlimited choices. Some choices are very basic, such as: serif or sans serif (of course, there are a large number of subclasses under both); Handwriting is also an accurate printing-grade font; Wide body or narrow body; Bold or thin. But in addition to these obvious choices, there are some terms that you may never have heard of:
Closed, semi-closed or open 4?
Three or two y's
Is there an extension or j on the bottom line?
Two-tier or single-tier architecture G?
Two-tier or single-tier architecture a?
Cross, connect or circle w?
You can compare some of your favorite fonts to understand these details, or more, for example, is three strokes Y more traditional for you? Are you going to adopt this structure in your new font? Is J with extension more suitable for your font, or have you decided not to let it exceed the baseline?
You may have more things to think about:
Height of horizontal bar in e
How many petals should your * (asterisk) have? I checked, and there are 4 petals, 5 petals and 6 petals.
Your inclination #.
Do your y and q have tails?
If you get stuck in these details from the beginning, you will never start the actual font design. But before you start designing, you really should consider them. Spending a little more time outside the font design software may prevent you from spending a lot of time repeatedly modifying or reworking characters in formal design.
Vertical measurement
There are a series of decisions you need to grasp, such as vertical measurement-a series of sizes determine the height of your character. The following terms are for you:
Along the top line, define the top position of lowercase letters (usually the highest point of lowercase B)
Capital height, which defines the height of capital letters (usually the height of capital H).
X height, the height of most lowercase letters, such as v.
Baseline, the imaginary line of the character "sitting".
Along the bottom line, define the bottom position of lowercase letters (usually the bottom of lowercase P)
Before you start designing fonts, you must solve the following problems related to vertical measurement:
Will the top edge of your tallest lowercase letter be higher than the height of uppercase letters? (Many fonts will exceed, but not all. )
How tall should your X be? Just raising or lowering the "standard" X height is enough to produce interesting effects. )
How low should the lower limit be set
There are some basic principles to consider when deciding the vertical size of a font.
Characters with curves at the bottom tend to be slightly below the baseline. Similarly, characters with curved tops usually slightly exceed the standard X height or capital height.
The reason for these basic principles is that these curved characters will look slightly smaller if they are not slightly higher or lower than those square characters. I mean, the law doesn't stipulate that you must abide by this rule. If your font works better at exactly the same baseline and height, do so. But if it is because you are not sure whether it is better to do so, it is really not a good idea to define them at the same height.
Level measurement
Defining the horizontal size of a font will take you a lot of time. The main horizontal measurement-kerning/kerning (details are as follows)-requires many hours of hard and meticulous work to complete. I think you must have read Johno's article on kerning before, right? No? ! You really should read it. Go ahead, I'll wait for you here. However, before we discuss kerning, we should first consider the side spacing (reserved space, or more concisely translated as "side frame").
Setting the edge spacing correctly can make the later kerning adjustment easier and save you a lot of precious time to optimize the level measurement.
Borders are spaces reserved for the left and right sides of characters. In the picture above, the left and right of the letter U define the same side frame. This is a common situation, but it is not necessary. Sometimes, the border can be positive on one side and negative on the other, which means that the border may be inside the character.
Note that the left frame (LSB) of J is already within the actual boundary of the character-it is equivalent to cutting off a part of the character. Why are you doing this? Ok, let's see what happens when J meets other letters.
The inner border tells the computer to render J closer to the adjacent characters on the left than the standard spacing. If the definition of the left frame and the right frame is the same, the space between J and the left adjacent frame will become large and hard.
Pitch adjustment can also solve this problem, but if J is always (or often) close to the adjacent character on the left, defining a negative side box can reduce your kerning work, and for those users who don't use kerning (unfortunately, most word processing software turns off kerning options by default), they can get better letter spacing.
kerning
After reading Johno's article on kerning, can you keep up with these basic courses? Here are some details about kerning that a font designer should know.
A good border setting is like having a head coach who has a good overall plan for the game, which can make your font get decent results in most cases without the user using kerning adjustment. But in some specific cases, in order to get perfect results, you must also have an excellent attack coordinator to organize the specific attack on the field-that is, kerning adjustment.
After setting the border, I like to print out the character pairs in the font and check what is wrong. I need the help of kerning. In fact, I wrote a script to generate an Open Office document from these character pairs, which you can download from here. Then you can open this document in Open Office, select all the characters, change them into your own fonts, and print them out for reference.
After you find the wrong people, you have to do it yourself and fix it yourself. Here is an example of my font, which shows V-e pairs with borders but no kerning. Pay attention to the gap between the two characters.
Then, after kerning:
What we need to do is to let the letters flow naturally from one letter to the next. I often think that kerning is like bringing my characters closer to each other.
Several problems that should be paid attention to when adjusting word spacing;
If you find it necessary to adjust the kerning of each pair of characters, there is probably something wrong with your border settings. Good border setting usually means that some character pairs have been set and no separate kerning is needed.
Someone will tell you that you only need to adjust the kerning of the most commonly used character pairs. For example, for Q, you only need to adjust the spacing between qu and qa, but qz is unnecessary-who will use qz in actual printing? But I am an exception. I insist on kerning all character pairs, no matter how unreasonable those combinations are. Those purists may faint again or be afraid of breathing difficulties. But why should I restrict the users of my fonts so that they can have beautiful kerning only when using standard character pairs? If someone wants to print qz, they should print a beautiful qz.
Most font editing software has automatic kerning function. This is a good start, but it is wise to check and adjust one by one after automatic adjustment. No algorithm can surpass the human eye.
Scratching the surface will cut the skin.
So far, we've only scratched our skin. If not handled in time, it may lead to "font mania". I do hope so. Even if I have been engaged in font design for so many years, I can still learn something new every time I open FontLab Studio and work hard in it.
Create your own font Ⅲ
Always looking for inspiration for font design. After the summer, I bought a cheap calligraphy pen and convinced myself that it would make my chicken crawl completely changed. After wasting a week and dozens of blank pages, I still didn't get anything interesting or slightly artistic. Finally, one night, tired and disappointed, I inserted a red refill after the black ink was used up, and then wrote the following alphabet-after that, it became my Joule family. I thought you might be interested if I wrote down how it became a font in this case study.
The following is one of the many sketches I wrote that night:
Close up:
Super close-up: I can't wait to use a capital a.
From Sketch to Font
The process of creating Joules fonts from sketches, as I wrote in the previous two articles, I scanned the sketches, and the following is what the scanned drafts look like after being converted into black and white bitmap mode in Photoshop.
Note the rough points contained in the original bitmap:
Usually I clean up these bitmaps before importing them into Fontlab, but this is an exception. The following is the first step to import a bitmap into ScanFont:
Scan font close-up:
I copied this new character to the correct location in FontLab. In order to let you experience how to adjust in FontLab, the following shows the imported coarse A in an enlarged way. I chose a problematic part.
Then start deleting those unpleasant nodes:
When adjusting characters in FontLab, we must strike a balance between two temptations: on the one hand, we should try to make the outline smooth, on the other hand, we should try to leave some rough nodes to keep the font interesting. I found that for calligraphy fonts, all rough nodes should not be smoothed. To some extent, that is equivalent to depriving them of the feeling of calligraphy.
Character synthesis of saving people from danger
One of the conveniences of FontLab is that it can automatically synthesize characters. In this example, I first created an A, and then created an "accent":
Then I double-click this "a-accept" box …
..... …FontLab created a composite role:
At this point, if you edit this A or that accent, the change will be automatically updated to the synthesized "A accent" immediately.
jamb wall
As I mentioned in my previous article on font design, setting appropriate borders is an important step. One reason is that proper borders will make kerning easier! ) First of all, I made a rough adjustment to the characters. I roughly created a small, front border. During initial editing, the side frame of this Y is as follows:
What's wrong with this setting? You can see the pairing of a and y in the initial kerning settings.
In fact, I can keep the border of this Y unchanged, then adjust Y to be close to A on the kerning, and so on, and adjust Y to be close to other characters on each kerning. But obviously, it is simpler and wiser to set a negative side frame for the left side of this y:
The following is what the improved blank setting looks like under the default kerning condition:
kerning
God, it took me hours to set the kerning of this font! Annoying details ... I'd better let you go. But here is another example of kerning. Before the adjustment, it was like this:
After adjustment:
Ligation line
I have created a considerable number of Joule ligatures, which users can choose to apply manually when typesetting.
The following is an example of how I created these conjunctions. First, let's look at the initial juxtaposition effect of Z and A.
In fact, I can make them overlap beautifully in a fashionable way when I match the spacing, but it is more responsible to be a z-a hyphen. Step one, create a blank character, and then copy Z and A:
Step 2, cut their contours so that they can be combined at the right position:
Step 3, delete the redundant part:
Step 4, move the characters to make them close:
Step 5, connect the nodes:
Intelligent hyphenation
The first version of Joules did not include intelligent hyphenation: this technology was only recently learned by me. (This means the end of TrueType fonts, because OpenType fonts must implement intelligent hyphenation technology. I won't nag about the details, but what I can tell you is that you need to open a special OpenType panel in Fontlab and write some scripts at ordinary times, so as to activate the ligatures you created in some software that can recognize ligatures. It looks something like this:
accomplish