HomeBook ProductionTypographyFont DesignFontographerCreating OpenType Fonts: Simplified

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Creating OpenType Fonts: Simplified — 13 Comments

  1. I have been looking for something like this for months! Im in the same boat. Opentype is a nightmare, but important, they need to make a program that simply generates this code out of a form.

    Bookmarked.

  2. Ive just attempted to update my font to include ligatures and small caps together with no luck, works fine with just ligatures so Im going to have to do that for now! Certainly very fiddly. Ive attempted to use Fontlab Studio with recommendation from a Fontlab Support guy, its like an alien program to me and I have no idea what I was supposed to do with it so I gave up!

  3. It’s extremely fiddly. It’s PITA. It’s always been a fight. It was a serious problem in FontLab also. I finally got some stuff to work. But it is code and there can be no typos, at all, or it won’t work.

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  5. Hi. Looks great, but how do I get it to work. I have my fog file and tried to go to Element > Font Info.
    I used the external file (.fea) but nothing happens. Is it not supposed to appear in my window? The fiels are still marked ** and do not have a name only the glyph number.
    HELP (I’ve been trying for weeks)
    Lene

  6. Hi Lene,

    yes, it is extremely frustrating. This is what the paragraph is about where it says there is “No easy way to add the characters in FOG”. This is exactly what I was talking about on page 113 of my book. After complaining that FOG does not do OpenType well, I explain that one of the major reasons is that there is no way to see the name of the glyph in the character slot of the font window. I can do it by opening one of my opentype fonts (the one I am using for the master of my feature set) and carefully pasting in my new characters over the old ones. This is tedious, frustrating and ridiculous, but it is the major reason why I have since left FOG and gone back toFontLab for my font design work. I still sometimes draw the original 256 characters in FOG, but since all my fonts are OpenType with features, I am eventually forced into Fontlab to deal with those things. The same things is true of letterspacing and kerning.

    Fontographer is designed for graphic designer hobbyists who want to have fun making a simple 8-bit font for their own use. For that use FOG is excellent. To go beyond that into professional font design I’m afraid that FontLab is required. Sorry, but I have little influence on changing that aspect of the software.

    You can pester the company and maybe they’ll fix things in a future version. But this is small niche work and there simply are not enough font designers to enable a font design software company to have the resources to make large changes like this—unless they bumped the price of their software to a thousand dollars or more. It’s a sad situation, but the good news is that if you really want to do this you can do it in Fontlab quite easily (with a lot of study and practice).

  7. I may have left a message before, but I just want to say thank you for this. I’ve a new font going live this month and all because the opentype features now work, so again thank you.

  8. How do I sub a word with multiple letters? For example can I do something like this

    @time = [t i m e];
    @dz = [d z];
    sub @time by @dz;

    Or

    sub t i m e by d z;

    Neither of these methods work. Got any ideas how to do this?

    -Tom

  9. Hi Tom,

    I’m not sure of your question. In Fontlab or Fontographer you can only work with one letter at a time, unless you draw multiple letters into a single glyph. Is that what you are talking about?

  10. David, Using FontStudio. What I’m trying to do is to replace two words with two glyphs. As an example. I’d like to replace the words ‘Sent From’ with ‘SF’. I know I can use:
    sub s' e' n' t' space f' r' o' m' by S;

    but can’t do this:
    sub s' e' n' t' space f' r' o' m' by S F;

    How can I replace several words with several glyphs?

    -Tom

  11. Hi Tom,

    I assume you are talking about FontLab Studio 5.x. But regardless, it seems as if you are confusing font design with page layout. What you want can easily be done in InDesign with either autocorrect or Find&Replace or GREP.

    I do not do coding at all. So, I’m no real help there, but I do think you are confusing software functions.

    If I simply do not understand the issues, please let me know and I’l try again.

Whatcha thinkin'?

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