A book to help you design fonts in FontLab

Here at the foundry we use FontLab 5 in the production of our fonts. Over the years we have developed over a hundred fonts. In the process we have picked up a lot of experience in the process of designing a font efficiently.

This is not a book for programmers and scripters. This is a book for graphic designers and typographers who love type and want to make their own fonts—either for themselves or to sell. For more fun and a more intuitive interface, you might want to try Fontographer. I wrote a book for that also.

In the process of writing this book several things were developed that you might find useful in your design process. In general these are pieces of copy or FontLab files that will save you the time required to make your own. There are lists of composite glyphs to generate, and OpenType features file, and a text file to use when generating metrics and kerning tables. You can find them in the sidebar to the right.

Here's a condensed table of contents for you to see what is in the book

Why a 3rd edition? xv

Because I’ve learned so much since I wrote the first two xv

This is a small one-person low budget operation xvi

Ebooks have brought about radical changes xvi

Welcome! To the 3rd edition of practical font design 1

Defining typography 2

Quotations on typography 2

Some terminology 5

Type parts 5

Some glyph terminology 6

Bringhurst’s List of font classifications 8

A Practical Approach To Classifying Fonts 9

Our carved roots 9

A practical list 10

The four basic classifications of all type are: 10

Old Style fonts: readable and beautiful (1500-1750 or so) 11

The entire oldstyle period of font design 21

Modern: Bodoni Book 21

Slab Serif: Cheltenham 23

Realist: Clarendon 24

Type for the common man—

ignored by almost every classification system 24

Late 19th & early 20th Century 25

Sans serif classifications 26

Readable, modulated sans serif fonts for text 29

What about the rest of the type styles? 30

Mimicking handwriting 31

Type drawing tools 33

We’ll start out with a little instruction on the Pen tool

Vector drawing tools & techniques using Illustrator CS5 33

The Pen Tool 34

How do you draw with paths? 35

Extrema 39

Path rules for drawing fonts 40

Setting up an Illustrator template 43

Why do we start with Illustrator? 46

The creation of a font 47

A step by step procedure 47

A new unilateral serif font 49

Begin with a new or base font 50

The Font Info dialog in FontLab 50

Metrics and Dimensions 57

Setting up your workspace 63

Preferences 63

Starting to draw 67

There are many ways to start a glyph: 67

Scan & trace 67

FontLab drawing techniques 70

Saving building pieces 79

Vector Paint 79

Building a storage glyph 81

Drawing weight balls 86

Adjusting the y measurements 86

Dealing with path direction 91

Finishing the numbers & letters 106

Some tips before we go on 108

This is a major change in the book! 108

I do not trust automated solutions 108

Letterspacing 109

Some definitions 109

The decisions needed for good letter fit 110

Basic methodology 110

FontLab’s Metrics panel 111

Typical adjustments to spacing 115

Display or Text? 118

For Practical Font Design: Part Two I went much more traditional 118

Generating fonts for testing 123

Making composite glyphs 127

Generating the basic characters 127

Adding OpenType Features 133

What is an OpenType feature? 133

Writing an OpenType feature 134

How a feature works 135

Using classes 136

Adding features to our new font 138

Ligatures 146

Kerning your new font 151

The Metrics window 151

The need for a kerning text document 152

The kerning process 154

what to kern & by how much? 156

Using real words 159

Classes 160

Tracing drawings & artwork 163

Placing into Illustrator 164

Make sure the scan is clean 164

Live Trace in Illustrator 166

Designing font families 171

Let’s start traditional 171

Book font family characteristics 175

Text versus display 175

The need for text and display versions 180

The need for a sans version 180

History Break: Minister 181

What is a book font family? 182

What do you need in a font family

Why not use the Bold effect? 197

Designing the stem and serif thickness 199

Why did I blend at such an early stage? 213

Building the blends 214

Building the italics 221

The importance of the metrics 221

Dealing with the weight 221

Setting the spacing 222

Getting started 222

Necessary italic changes 231

Building Italic composites 232

Kerning & Assembling the family 237

Keeping the family consistent 237

Generating the fonts 241

Finding testers 242

Test before you release 242

Building the Display version 243

But we need something more: a companion sans. 248

General design vision changes 261

Finishing them off 266

Here’s what we ended up with 267

P.S: I guess I better work on a Web version next 267