![]() However, because of my odd setup, I had to scale my glyphs 192% before copying. I can just copy in Illustrator and paste in FontLab. Pasting Glyphs Into FontLab from Illustrator ![]() I set these same guides in a space that FontLab VI calls the “Sketchboard.” This is a space where I can copy and paste glyphs and various elements, mess around with stuff, draw things, and then move them to the glyph palette when ready. When I set up the new font file in FontLab, the first thing I did was set up my UPM and the placement of each guideline (descender, baseline, x-height, cap, and ascender). The next font I design will be set up with this 1000 UPM space in mind from the start, so I don’t have to fudge any numbers or do any scaling. The good thing is, this is a very wobbly hand drawn font, so the fudging works just fine. Now, I may have fudged my numbers just a hair, in order to make the descender, x-height, and cap height nice round numbers. Whatever the distance is from descender to cap diacritic, plus a little buffer for safe space, that is the number I will need to map to the 1000 UPM space in FontLab.Īfter I found that number I figured out that I would need to scale my Illustrator outlines by about 192% before copying them to FontLab. If I were to stack my guidelines, and include glyphs with descenders and uppercase with diacritics, as well as some wiggle room, how much vertical space would that be? Basically I’m figuring out the minimum comfortable linespacing with my existing guidelines in Illustrator. Now I have to translate the guidelines in Illustrator into that round number space. The easiest way to work in FontLab (for me) is with a UPM of 1000. In a digital space, this is the height of the imaginary box containing each glyph. The UPM (Units Per eM) would be the distance from the bottom to the top of the face of the slug, and all of the glyphs would have to fit within that height (for all intents and purposes). If this font were made on metal slugs of type, all of the slugs would need to be the same height. As long as the guidelines are all the same proportion, however, I just have to scale the glyphs to match the new space. ![]() Unfortunately, when I set up the Illustrator files, I was thinking about the featured images for my blog, not the font file. I just have to make sure the guidelines in FontLab are the same as the guidelines I’ve been using thus far when drawing the glyphs and putting them in Illustrator. I need the outlines I copy from Illustrator to be at the correct scale when I paste them into FontLab.įontLab uses guidelines for the font to mark the relative locations of the ascender line, cap line, x-height, and descender line. One of the nice things about FontLab is that it allows outlines copied in Illustrator to be pasted in FontLab VI. ![]() So all of the images were traced at the same scale. Remember those guidelines I’d been using when I drew the glyphs? I’ve been using those same guidelines in Illustrator as well. Standardize Digitizing To Make Importing Easier In this post I’ll go over how I moved from Illustrator into FontLab VI. For a typeface that’s supposed to look hand drawn like Protest, digitizing using Adobe Illustrator’s Image Trace seemed to yield the best results. In my previous post I walked through my process of digitizing hand drawn glyphs.
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