Typophile

Problems with the overall shape of the letter when generating it in Studio 5

Stefan Chirila

Hello everyone,

I'm having a small problem when generating my font with Studio 5. I'm new to this program and after looking through the manual with no luck and after I did some search o the internet with no luck also I thought to give it a try and ask here.

I drew my fonts in Illustrator and they look nice, smooth curves, few points and everything. I import them in Studio 5 and they look very nice also. I hit generate font, install the font in windows and when I try typing with it to use it... the curves don't look nice anymore. Something happens along the way and I just can't figure out what. If I convert the letter to outlines in Illustrator it gets a lot of points also, like 50 instead of 15 when I drew it. The letters look nice in both Illustrator and Studio 5, but they don't look so nice after I generate it as a true type/open type.

I have a feeling this might be a silly question for the experienced but I'm at the beginning and I didn't know where to turn to.

Thank you in advance!

Jason Campbell

could you post a screenshot of the problem? As you mentioned windows, I wonder if your problem is caused by autohinting when generating the font.

Stefan Chirila

Here are three instances of the endings of a letter. The first one is the clean one made in Illustrator. The second one is how it looks like after generating it as Open Type TT/True Type in Fontographer and the third one is after generating it FontLab Studio 5. Also I've tuned off autohinting in Fontographer before generating the font. Anyway, the curves are not smooth, not like the original vector drawing.

Thanks for taking a look. I just don't know what to do.

Reynir Heiðberg...

If your tools let you export a CFF-flavoured (or PostScript-flavoured) OpenType font, how do things look like inside one? I'm guessing there is a conversion from cubic to quadratic splines that is messing things up.

Stefan Chirila

Yes, it is the conversion cubic to quadratic splines. I did not know that yesterday but I did more reading. I was in panic yesterday. The shapes look much better in OpenType. Thank you!

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