Use small caps. Small caps are a specialized letterform. They are a smaller set of capital letters (often a bit larger than the x-height), used in place of the lowercase letters, which are designed so they have the same color as the rest of the font. Many of the OpenType Pro font families have real small caps. Faux small caps One of the typesetting options in most professional software (and many word processors) has been the use … Continue reading →
I probably shouldn’t have put an exclamation mark on the title for I haven’t had a chance to try it yet. I’m still wading through the documentation. But I’ve been waiting for this for a long time. The CS6 plug-in Here’s a quote from their Web page from which you can download the plug-in. Kindle Plugin for Adobe InDesign® (Beta) is officially supported by Amazon to convert files to the Kindle format. We recommend you use Kindle … Continue reading →
Before we can get into this, though, we have to start with terminology. Typography requires a new language. Much of this is based on historical printing usage and the font design process. Without at least a few of these terms you will be lost. This has been complicated now that all of the digital terms have been added to the mix. So, we really need to start with a little of font design. Not only the different … Continue reading →
Last week I talked about the basic 256 characters in a “normal 8-bit” font . We covered the keystrokes used to access what the PC calls the Upper ASCII glyphs. Then I began to talk about additional characters that will not fit into a normal font. We started with small caps and numbers: oldstyle figures, lining figures, and small cap figures. Today we finish a very brief coverage of additional characters. Ligatures In some cases, letters simply … Continue reading →
A font is a very specific thing. A font is the entire set of characters for a given type style. In the days of letterpress (1460 to 1970), a font was all the characters in a given point size. You had Times 12-point, Times 14-point, Garamond 18-point, and so on. In some old fonts, this was hundreds of characters. When phototype became available in the 1950s, a font came in several sizes. These film strips could be … Continue reading →
One of the more daunting aspects of book design for the inexperienced is page layout. Most people have Word experience and as I have said countless times already—Word cannot do professional page layout. In fact, it is worse than that because Word’s feeble attempts give you bad habits and poor expectations—which must be corrected. I’m assuming that you have your preferences set up; and that you have designed a good, efficient workspace that fits your style of … Continue reading →
OpenType Simplified In two words, it’s confusing. FontLab has good, professional tools for developing OpenType fonts—but it is certainly not simple or easy. Fontographer really does not deal well with OpenType at all. Having said that, if you have a feature file, you can use it in Fontographer 5.1. You link to it in the font info dialog box on the Encoding page. Fontographer will use that feature file to build your OpenType font when you generate … Continue reading →
Why do you want to use Fontographer? For the fun of it! When I received the opportunity to go back to my roots, and see what the new Fontographer was like, I was a little concerned. I had just spent nine years painfully teaching myself to letterspace by hand, to write OpenType features, and to become accustomed to the tool set of FontLab. Don’t get me wrong, FontLab is a great program and I am … Continue reading →
I’ve decided to extend the proofing release for at least another month until I decide what to do with letterspacing in Fontographer. I want to develop an easy way for font designers (who do it for fun) to letterspace their work. I no longer believe that Fontographer will auto space well enough for pro releases of fonts for sale. Please take a look at the proof and let me know what you believe. http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/practical-font-design-for-graphic-designers-fontographer/17144172 The PDF download … Continue reading →
Personally, I started in Fontographer in the early 1990s and gradually built a little sideline of designing fonts. They were selling a little on Myfonts.When OpenType became viable with the release of InDesign I needed to find something else. My old version of Fontographer would not run in Mac OSX very well. Thomas Phinney, then of Adobe, told me I had no option but to go to FontLab. This transformed my career. I learned how to write … Continue reading →