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Creating types : building the font file
This time, you don't have many choices; unless you're found of metal sculpture and of antiques, you got to go digital!
Of course, you'll need a specialized soft. There are some few freewares (mostly true type editors), but most serious ones will costs you some few bucks. have a look in our Softwares & utilities section to see those creation tools, and broke your money-box. We especially recommend Macromedia's Fontographer and Pyrus FontLab. Both are avaliable on Macintosh & PC and can be bought on-line at their respective sites.
SETTING METRICS
The first thing you should do now it create a new font file in your soft, and specify its name and its metrics, that is the total height of the font, and the heights of the ascender and descender.
Your grid will be usefull to calculate them:
To do that, create a block that represents the total height of the face (1). Note that we left some vertical space between the top of capitals and the top of total height, as long as between the bottom of descender ands the bottom of the total height (3). This allows shapes that goes out of the EM square or below the descender to have some room (for example the accents or the cedilla). It also avoid touching previous or following lines when line-heights are small.
Now, we create a second block that measures the ascender height of our face (2).
We now just have to use those two heights to calculate the perthousand value of the ascender (the total height of a character slot is set to 1000).
So the formula that gives the ascent's height in the font is:
(grid's ascent height x 1000)/grid's total height
(note that in fact, the total height of a font can be anything you want, as it is a relative measure, but 1000 is more handy. The only esssential thing is that ascender+descender must equal total height).
So we can now specify the ascent (724 in our example), and the descent (1000-724=276) in the font metrics of our font editor.
THE MASTER BLOCK
At this point, you can start pasting the letters from the drawing soft to each letter slot of the font soft. Of course there is always a way to import them, but the easiest way, is to use Command-alt-C to copy the postscript drawing directly.
And here is what you'll got:
OUPS! Something wrong isn't it? As you can see, softs are resizing what you are pasting to the whole height of the font. Then, here come the master block : use the block you've created to measure the total height (1) , and, copy it alongside with each letterform, on the right side of the letter.
As you can see above, the master block ensure the letterform stays at the right size, and come at the right place (i.e. sitting on the baseline). Then you can erase it.
You can also use the master block to easily measure the sidebearings. In fact, sidebearings are quite important, and there are various school on that subject:
some people are placing spaces on each side of the letters (about one half of the width of the stem on each side). That''s the classic way.
some are placing it only on the right edge, mostly setting it to the stem's width.
a third school puts no sidebearings at all, and monitors all spacing issues with the kerning pairs.
Our recommendation is the first solution as it is helpfull when spacing the letterforms (see below).So set the master block to the width of half a stem , duplicate it and place them on both sides of letters. Then do your command-alt-C magic to copy the letterform and the two blocks in the coreponding letter slot.
Then, erase the left black that automatically located the letter at the right distance from the origin. Use the right one to place exactly the right edge of the font, and erase it too.
Now, do it for each letter.
MOST COMMON MISTAKES
The most common mistake is the infinite space. Lot of authors just forget to have an eye on the space character. But even if there's nothing in it, it must have a width! Most fonting soft sets it (like all others letters) to the same amount as the total height (1000 in our example). When typing text, this makes words much too far from each others, and creates holes in the texts.
So it is important to have an eye on that, and to specify a width for the space character. Generally, it should be setted to the same width than the lowercase o, or the lowercase x.
And remember that if you don't draw some usefull letters, they will also have this oversized width...
Another recurrent error is about path directions.When you draw something in a postscript editor (Illustrator, freehand or any postscript font editor), you are manipulating Bezier curves. Even if you don't see it, they have a direction, clockwise or counterclockwise. and if two shapes having the same path direction are overlaped, this reverse the color of the overlapped part, just like this:
Not what you wanted, probably! And more, there is an order! For a O, the external shape must be clockwise (as it is the first one from left to right and bottom to top), and the inner one must be counterclockwise. It can be a real pain in the ass to check each shape.
Fortunately, most serious font editors offers automated direction checking. In Fontographer, for example, it is named Correct Path Direction. So it is always a good idea to check this before generating the font files.
People having trouble with path directions are often the same who use several shapes to build a single letterform. This is not a good idea, for the path direction reason, but also because it produces heavy font files, with letters having lots of useless points. Most Drawing softs and Font editors offers functions that allows you to remove useless shapes in several ways (Remove overlap in Fontographer, or Pathfinder in Illustrator). It won't take long, but will reduce dramatically the size of the font files.
A TIME & ENERGY-SAVING TIP : USING GHOSTS
The main reason most freeware or shareware authors are issuing font without accents is that they think it take lot of time to do it! But they are wrong! Avaliable since a long time in Fontographer and now in all major font editors, the ghosts, also named Composite letters, are allowing you to do it very quickly.
The idea behind composite face was first to make font files less heavy : there are, for example, 6 different accentuated lowercase a.
Why drawing each a, and each accents for each letters? Why not drawing each accent once, each letter once, and tell the soft how to combine them? That's what Composite are about.
You draw the lowercase a and the acute, and paste them in their respective slots. Then you create a ghost of each one ('Copy Reference' in Fontographer), and past them into the aacute slot. You just have then to check for lateral position of the acute.
(Note that ghosts also includes the sidebearings and the position of the letters, and that the first one pasted gives its width to the letter. So always starts by pasting the letter, and then the accent).
But even more interesting is the fact that if you change something at the a, or put a different lettershape in it, it will changes all the corresponding composites! So you not only avoid to draw all letters, but you can avoid creating the composite each time!
If you have one model font file, with all the composite made, you simply have to fill the original letters, and the ghosts will build the composite ones automatically! You just have to open each letter once to check the position of the ghosts.
Here it is. Each letters are drawn or composed, and it's time to see if they're living well together.
Let's see how you can help them.
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