Fontographer:

Practical Font Design for Graphic Designers

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 grateful for what I have learned. There are still a few features of FontLab that, as a professional font designer, I cannot do without. But I was taken by surprise.

Fontographer brought the fun back!

It is still the same marvelous program with which I first learned to design fonts. The drawing interface is still clean, clear, and elegant. I still works the way I have learned to work over the past two decades of digital graphic design. I found pure joy in drawing again. Fontographer is a wonderful drawing experience. It has been a real joy to experience that fun again. After nearly a decade in FontLab, font design is fun again.

To quote from the book:

"Fontographer is an application which appeals to experienced graphics designers with a background in PostScript illustration—especially those with FreeHand experience from version 7 and earlier. The majority of designers working in the mid-1990s had a copy of Fontographer. It came free with the FreeHand Graphics Studio first released in 1995—and everyone probably used it [at least a little].

Fontographer had [and still has] a unique and intuitive set of drawing tools that enable amateurs of that era to enter the world of font design. I'm talking amateurs in the sense that John Baskerville considered himself an amateur—as I also consider myself, though I am certainly not in Baskerville's league. For me, font design is a beloved sideline with which I indulge myself. It's become a treasured tool I use in my current trade—book writing, designing, and production."

Table of Contents (Abridged)

Fontographer or FontLab?

Which one should you use?

Who is this book written for?

The key role of Fontographer in the font revolution

Defining typography

Some type terminology

How do you draw with paths?

Type drawing tools

The Fontographer Toolbox

The transformation tools

The Pen Tool

A revised decorative font

The Font Info dialog

Using the Layers palette

Modifying a font

Building a pieces glyph

Pasting in the components

Fixing all the special characters

Moving on: a new font

Setting up the font

Doing the caps

Developing a work style

Doing the lowercase

If you do not like my serifs or weight decisions

Finishing the lowercase

Letterspacing

Looking at letterspacing conceptually, What is the goal?

Auto-spacing in Fontographer

If you are going to sell your fonts

Accents (diacritics) and composites

Currency glyphs & other specialities

Ligatures, Swashes et al

OpenType features

Designing oldstyle figures

Building the small caps

Finishing the letterspacing

Auto Kern settings

Dealing with the small caps

Finishing the font

Fixing the rough glyphs

Doing a bold version

This is where you find out how well you drew the original font

Dealing with the different weights

Adding an italic

Generating a font

Web fonts

Beginning a new font of your own

Type Classifications

The entire oldstyle period

Sans serif classifications

Current fashion

Mimicking handwriting

Starting to draw a new font

Dealing with scans & stuff

Developing a standard procedure

An order of creation

Letter construction tips

Number construction tips

Appendix A: Advanced Letterspacing

Hand letterspacing fonts

Fontographer's Metrics panel

Letterspacing as you draw

Conforming your options to reality

Using the Metric Panel

Some letterspacing tips

Appendix B: Dealing with OpenType & Resources

Index

Please help me by emailing me with your comments & typos