Using Illustrator to draw typefaces

and don’t forget to read the comments.

quick response! ill try it out.THANX!

Wow! To make sure the drawing didn’t scale wrong in the copy, I used to make an Em square, incl. baseline, and copy that along with the glyph. It reminded me, always, of the cartoon with the portable hole that the cat-burgler character would use to get loot through windows and escape from the cops.

I was moving whole cases back and forth then just to change serifs, or all of a stem type, or importing logos. Do other people use this path in the design porocess nowadays, or is it primarily an entry level, or very-special-case path. Also wondering if anyone knows of a InD/FL path? :)

I think it’s mainly people who can’t get used to drawing directly in FontLab (i.e., wimps). Seriously, there are some procedures which are easier to do in Illustrator, which is reason enough to use it in many cases. But you can always go from FL > Illustrator > FL if you just need to run a special Illustrator filter on a glyph or whatever. As a routine method for drawing glyphs, though, working in Illustrator involves quite a few extra steps and seems inefficient to me now. (I used to work that way.)

> Also wondering if anyone knows of a InD/FL path? :)

You make a PostScript file out of InDesign, then run through GhostScript’s free “ps2ai” utility and import the resulting file into FontLab. It’s easy. The most dreadful step for many people will be using the command-line GhostScript. :)

Adam

I think there’s a difference between being a wimp and not wanting to come out of a well-worn, smooth groove. Immersion into a particular interface is just as important/efficient as the power -and even elegance- of an interface.

hhp

I sometimes start putting letterforms together in FreeHand, which is my drawing program of comfort/choice. But once outlines are in FLab, that’s where I work on them. (Quite often these days, I will start drawing in FLab.)

One of the greatest benefits of this “workflow”, or “workpuddle”, is that there are no surprises with nodes and BCPs aligning to whole units on the em grid. If you develop a font with a lowercase “i” with a vertical stroke width of, say, 25 units, and you want to center a 30-unit wide dot, you can make that in AI or FH, but it won’t fly in FLab. Likewise, if you wanted a 29-unit wide dot on your i, you couldn’t have a perfect circle, since the midpoint of 29 is 14.5, and decimals are verboten.

Unfortunately, FOG gave us the false impression that we could work in decimals and half-units, but the app then “flattened” points and handles when the fonts were generated.