A new member with too many questions...

[Julius]

Hi typography freaks from all over the world,

I'm a swiss graphic designer and amateur font designer living and working in Finland. I'm happy that I've finally found a forum to post questions and share ideas with letter-loving people!

I've thought about it lately and I think I've always had a love for letters and loved to play with them; whether through drawing, calligraphy or even graffiti (did a lot of those letter-based ones as a teenager).

I fell in love with font designing around a couple years ago and I started creating my first own fonts since summer 2008. So far I've designed a set of nine runic fonts, a black letter, a sans and another display font, the last three inspired by posters from the 1930's. I'll try to post them on my personal website as soon as I'll be more or less happy with them.


As I'm rather new to the more technical aspect of font designing, I have a lot of questions for you guys. Hope they'll find answers.

1. First of all, what programme are you using? I've heard of Font Creator, Fontographer, FontLab, etc... What are their inconvenients and advantages? So far I've only used Font Creator which I think is pretty good. At least it seems like it's the only affordable one... But I'm rather disappointed about the import quality from Illustrator. And that leads me to my second question:

2. All my fonts have been done in Illustrator and then imported in Font Creator via copy/paste. Unfortunately a lot of the sharp angles become blunted after the transition... The original anchor points and curves are also destroyed in the process. It would be stupid if I had to correct/redraw all the characters in Font Creator and I'm anyway not really willing to compromise on using Illustrator to design my fonts. I think the font creating programmes don't allow a tenth of the possibilities offered by Illustrator. Any of you having the same problem? Are there other font programmes that are more compatible with Illustrator?

3. Which set of characters do you guys use when creating your fonts? So far I've used the Adobe Standard Encoding with the full Western European character set because I think it's complete enough. Though it annoys me that it doesn't include the Eastern European characters... which leads me again to the next question:

4. What's the point of having all the Eastern European accents (macron, caron, breve, etc.) included in a font as it seems the accented letters won't show anyway? I tested my fonts with for ex. Lithuanian and Romanian texts but it looks that it just doesn't work that easily... The problem is that creating all those accented characters one by one almost triples the work, notably because of kerning issues!

5. And last, does any of you knows if it is possible to find special texts or paragraphs that contain unusual characters string in order to test the fonts? I'm thinking about kerning here. I do it so that I copy whatever texts I can find on the net in Finnish, Danish, Icelandic, French, German, etc. so that I can test as much strange characters strings as possible. But it unfortunately doesn't guarantee that I checked all possible letter pairs. Any better idea for testing fonts?


Well, I think that'll be enough for starters! :-) Sorry for stuffing so many characters in one post - should I have spread the questions in five different threads?.. Anyway, thanks in advance for helping me out of the font darkness and Happy New Year to everybody.

[Toon]

I have never made a typeface, but I'll welcome you any way and point you to a few threads you might be able to a) find info b) help out with

How to Create a Font making it a usable TTF file?
just finished my Font, need comments
Quicksand Typeface
The Complete Typography Guide
font conference

[headphones]

^^ Toon comes through yet once again.

[SidekickWD]

Welcome!

[Julius]

Thank you Toon, I found interesting information in the links you posted. Though I didn't really find any answer to my questions... I hope more people will participate to the thread in the near future!

[zumojuice]

Are there other font programmes that are more compatible with Illustrator?

It's a shame adobe stopped development in this area and I believe the real thing costs quote a bit more. I did look into one a while back which cost a fair chunk, which had a 'illy' like interface. Effectivly all the smart guides and snap to grides to make it precise.

Personally I've not created any typefaces this way. Most of mine are display faces used for the odd job, so illy can handle these fine..

Eastern European characters...

In most cases, a number of these can be adapted from existing characters. To be honest, start with the basic set and see how that goes down first. Tweek it to perfection then add the other characters later as you go.

5. And last, does any of you knows if it is possible to find special texts or paragraphs that contain unusual characters string in order to test the fonts?

Obviously in english, 'The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog' uses all the letters but not all the combinations. I think this would be quite hard to do, but the best thing is to use poetry or famous text, since this will most likely use the language to its fullest extent.

[Julius]

Yep, the "quick brown fox" is useful for the alphabet but I'd need a text featuring parentheses, bracket, slashes, currency symbols, etc... Well, I could always do one myself but I just wanted to know if somebody had a ready-made one! :-)

You're right about the accented glyphs, most of them are a just combination of existing ones, but the testing part becomes almost unbearably long and painful when adding all of them... That's why I wondered why the Eastern accents are included in the standard sets but the actual accented glyphs won't automatically work anyway. Weird.

As for the programme issue, I think I'll stick with FontCreator, be it just for this simple equation: FontCreator 5 Professional Edition = 149$, Fontographer 4.1.5 = 349$...

[Julius]

Oh yeah, and FontLab Studio 5.0 = 649$...