Typophile

MacOS Roman completed, what to do next?

Juan Garrido

Hi everybody,

Today I finished filling all the glyph slots for the MacOS Roman codepage, I have other glyphs as well for Central European languages, mostly compound ones, but that is irrelevant to the nature of my post.

I'm a little lost of what to do next and I need some advice. I have read somewhere that once you are finished with a basic codepage set of characters in a particular weight you should move to developing another weight (for example black) disregarding kerning at his moment. I have also read that you should begin developing alternate characters like small caps, inferiors, superiors and so on. I have also read you should begin kerning and make the font ready to use asap.

So, i don't really know what of those three options I should follow. Of course I'd like to kern and make my type usable fast, but if that means that I'm gonna waste time at a later stage, better do something else.

If you guys don't mind telling, what is the usual developing process you usually follow? A little insight into the design methodologies/stages that other typographers use could help me a lot. A little words explaining why you prefer to kern instead of designing the black version, for example, would be useful too.

Thanks!

Juan Garrido

Almost 20 hours and nobody wants to share some tips??

Craig Eliason

I would go to weights next.

Hrant H Papazian

That's not a question, that's a book! :-)
But give me a few more hours...

hhp

Andreas Stötzner

When building a family, I usually prefer to finish (almost) the mother font first, before turning to build the other weights. That includes kerning tables, definitely. If you have to kern V-a T-o and so on in Regular, you’ll have to do it as well most likely in Bold or Light. Of course you may choose to ex-/import kerning tables from one file to another; I prefer to settle this in one file first and then just to change glyphs to create another weight. – This may be a matter of personal preference.
But when completing a mother file this always includes the exact definition of the actual character set. Once this has been worked out, my 1st file serves as a template for all the others to come. If you finalize your encoding at a later stage you ’d have to check several files against each other, this may be laborious and error-prone.

John Hudson

Add a few more characters: your core glyph set is best made a superset of the Mac OS Roman and the Windows ANSI codepages.

HVB

My first impression from your question was that you're building a large mansion, have just completed surveying the property and planted a couple of flags, maybe even had a groundbreaking, and are asking, "what next".

Craig Eliason

If you finalize your encoding at a later stage you ’d have to check several files against each other, this may be laborious and error-prone.

...unless you're using a font editor that easily allows you to build all the weights in one file, like Glyphs (or two files, one for all the roman weights and one for all the italic weights).

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