There's an easy way to fix this. (Sorry for my incorrect terminology and english in the following): In Illustrator make a rectangle the size which extends from the character which has the lowest point to the letter which has the highest (from the descender to the ascender). When you copy from Illustrator you should copy several letters (or all of them if your computer can handle it) together with that rectangle.

Move to your font application and paste the characters into a slot. Now you should have your characters in Fontographer or FontLab. And they should all be proportionally aligned as you intended. From there on it’s just a matter of moving each letter into its own slot. I hope that helps.

/Robert

Thanks for the reply. I got the outlines into Fontographer by using Illustrator 8 and the scaling trick worked a treat.

I find myself in the bizarre position of being asked to digitise an artists handwritten font which is going to be on a specific range of greetings cards for a company that has world wide distribution - and this is the first font I have ever digitised.

I spent a long time tracing the scans and the spacing and kerning was fun to do as the font is emulating handwriting and requires a certain random look to emulate the original scans.

Today I took the font in and within an hour they had approved it and the art team were using it on the range of cards, which is quite scary as I have not even finished making ALL the characters I would like to include with the font. Due to very long ascenders and descenders the font is quite small in comparison to other fonts at the same point size. I offered tho try and tweak this but they want to use the font now and say that it will only ever be used for captions and although it would be useless for body text it works very well for the captions.

Three weeks ago I had never made or even attempted to make a font and I would like to thank typophile for the many hours of fine reading material. I am now hooked and although my first font is going to appear in a number of countries on an overwhelming number of cards, I am now seriously into type faces.

I did try FontLab but my bezier drawings pasted into it so badly that I may have well just drawn them in FontLab to start with. Trouble was, I had already drawn them in illustrator (which I have experience with) and once I realised that I had to use Illustrator 8, the curves went into Fontographer perfectly.

Thanks again for the help.

Paul

> I did try FontLab but my bezier drawings pasted
> into it so badly that I may have well just drawn
> them in FontLab to start with. Trouble was, I
> had already drawn them in illustrator (which
> I have experience with) and once I realised that
> I had to use Illustrator 8, the curves went
> into Fontographer perfectly.

Paul,

note however that Fontographer will also distort your glyphs -- when it generates the font. Fontographer allows non-integer coordinates during the drawing, so you can paste arbitrary artwork, and freely scale and move it in Fontographer. But when Fontographer generates the font, it will round all the coordinates to integers, causing your outline points change positions. It can be easily tested: just generate a Type 1 font in Fontographer and read it back in, then compare.

FontLab does to rounding already at the beginning of the process. So if you scale the glyphs to the appropriate size in Illustrator and paste them into FontLab, you will see exactly what the forms will look like in the final font. In the end, whatever goes into the font from Fontographer or FontLab, is the same. The difference is that FontLab always shows you in full WYSIWYG what the font outlines will look like while Fontographer allows you more freedom in the design process but then does the coordinate rounding for you in an uncontrolled manner. Which usually means you will have to redraw the glyphs anyway so *you* decide where the nodes should snap rather than the application.

There are some additional informations at:
http://groups.msn.com/fontlab/tipsandtricks.msnw?action=get_message&mvie...

Regards,
Adam Twardoch
Fontlab Ltd. -- The home for Fontographer and FontLab

"Fontlab Ltd. — The home for Fontographer and FontLab"

mmmmm.....just PR issue -- why not Fontlab Ltd. — The home for FontLab and Fontographer ?

Thanks Adam, that makes sense now I have generated my font. I must admit that because I actually own Fontographer I could play around with it a lot more.

I am pleased with how this has gone and the font does look like the artists original captions, right down to the spacing and kerning. It was a steep learning curve and I haven't even begun to scratch the surface.

Here is a pdf of the captions followed by the same caption written in the font. Remember, it is my first attempt and the brief was to remain faithful to the hand drawn alphabet.

My Font

Thanks for your help and I look forward to checking out the alternative and forthcome font making apps......

Paul