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Hello,

I am attempting to create a comics font in FontLab. I've been having some problems with how the font looks in FontLab, compared to how it looks in other programs once it's been created.

For example, in the image below, note how the "..." at the end of the sentance differs. The top one is how it looks in FontLab (and how i would like it to look). The bottom one is how it looks in Illustrator once I create the font. The spacing between the dot dot dots is quite noticable.

I'm exporting the font as TTF.

Any thoughts on this would be most appreciated.

Thanks very much,
Colin White
FontLab_comics_font

unknown

You could start by opening up the global spacing about 20% and closing the space character about 30% . . .

:D

unknown

Are you using three dots "..." or a single ellipsis character "�"?
I always kern .. tightly together (so that three dots is the same width as an ellipsis), but that's just a quick and easy solution - not necessesarily the right one :-)

unknown

The difference between the two in generally erratic, and the font lab version is better (though I agree with stuart letterspacing is toooo tight, and the space between words toooo large). My guess is that the kerning is to blame. In font lab you have kerning turned off. In illustrator, I bet it is on (and brutalizing your nice work, see the qu for example). To see if that's what is happening click the K button in the FL metrics window and compare.

Did you hit Autokern? A dangerous and sometimes useful game.
If that is what it is, get rid of all the kerning in the font, and just do a limited number of pairs by hand. Do a search for kerning pairs on typophile to get a list of recommended pairs.

R

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