Tag Archives: OpenType

Font Design Webinar, tomorrow June 10 Noon Eastern

Skilled Workman Posted on by

I’ll be sharing tips and techniques on letterspacing. This important task is relatively easy in FontLab and I’ll show you how. Here’s FontLab’s invite: Advanced Font Creation Tips, Made Accessible David Bergsland’s first webinar on troubleshooting font creation got a standing ovation from the attendees! David’s no-nonsense designer-friendly approach is accessible to all. Now he is following it up with “Advanced Font Creation” in FontLab Studio Tuesday June 10 at 9:00 am Pacific / noon Eastern / 18:00 CEST. Register … Continue reading →

It’s very good seed! A graphic & font family package

Skilled Workman Posted on by

This is another package I’ve put up on Creative Market. An excellent image of good seed sprouting in good soil… A four-font serif family named Artimas. A good start to a card design This stuff is just useful and at a very good price. The retail cost is well over $100. This package is: Only $29

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Another font for book cover design: Astaire

Skilled Workman Posted on by

Until just after the Fourth, this outstanding font family is on sale for on $9 a font. Astaire has the elegance you need At 64% off, through Myfonts, this is an excellent deal to start your summer by building your font library. This is the annual sale of one of my favorite font families. It is a beautifully stylized set of fonts which are remarkably readable. They work really well for large copy in cover design. Each … Continue reading →

Reminder: PostScript fonts do not work in ePUBs

Skilled Workman Posted on by

 Click to enlarge This capture shows you some of the different characters available in an OpenType font. This font, Contenu Book, has oldstyle figures [lowercase], lining figures [caps], & small cap figures. It also has true small caps, discretionary ligatures, ornaments, ordinals, and more. These things are always supposed to be used in print, even though only InDesign and Quark support such a thing for page layout AFAIK. I assume most of you know this, but I … Continue reading →

Desktop, laptop, or tablet?

Skilled Workman Posted on by

I found a good article today which explains many of the issues. My main issue with the conclusions is that I cannot be productive with a laptop. If you are just writing, an iPad with Apple’s wireless keyboard will do the job for you very well. The article misses my most important category of software apps: the Creative Cloud. My two most used apps [outside of Mail and Safari], are InDesign and Photoshop. I can easily see that … Continue reading →

Contrary to common opinion, InDesign CC has helped ePUB export a lot

Skilled Workman Posted on by

In the ePUB world, it is amazing how much bad press is given to InDesign. In fact, the coverage given to coders and developers of ePUBs matches the hype received in the media by Obama. But we won’t go there. I just received yet another posting in an author group I am in this morning. The writer stated that InDesign does not handle embedded fonts in ePUBs well. This is simply untrue. In fact, InDesign ePUB export … Continue reading →

The Book Designer’s Book Typography and Fonts package

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Make your book professional with the Contenu/Buddy production group Self Publisher Book Typography & 16 Fonts Only $49.99 or 12 Radiqx house fonts for book design Only $29.99 For self publishers the conversion from Word to InDesign is a huge leap. The goal is a professional look to their book designs, but immediately the problems of typography raise their head. In Word that is not so much of an issue because the typography controls in Word are … Continue reading →

Keeping your file size under control for graphic ePUBs

Skilled Workman Posted on by

I was working on my best-selling book this morning, Practical Font Design, Third Edition. It’s an ePUB with 266 graphics in it—almost entirely screen captures—showing what I am doing in FontLab as I design a font. I design my ePUBs in InDesign CS6 & use the export unchanged I realize that’s anathema to many of you code geeks, but the ePUBs out of InDesign are now more than good enough—if you design within its limitations. Now that … Continue reading →

Geralde: Garamond, the classic serif font

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Garalde: Garamond 3 This group is named in homage to Claude Garamond and Aldus Manutius. These original serif fonts are exemplified by the work of Claude Garamond in Paris in the early to mid-1500s. Robert Slimbach released a new interpretation of Claude Garamond’s and Robert Granjon’s styles called Adobe Garamond Pro—now ramped up to Premier after redoing the OpenType version. Garamond was the first major type designer. He was not a printer or calligrapher, he was a freelance punchcutter. Along with … Continue reading →

Some glyph or character shape terminology in font design

Skilled Workman Posted on by

Some glyph terminology First we better define glyph. To be honest, I’ve never gotten this straight. To me it is just another term for a character or letter. Technically, it is typespeak for variations of a character. An A, an A with a swash, A small cap A might be considered three glyphs of the letter A. In my font design books, a glyph has a separate design window for a character in a font. Before we … Continue reading →