UKC

Hi helpful peoples,
I do a bit of lettercutting as part of my day job, and have found a font that I like very much and would like to use more. I came across a photo of a few letters in this style, and from those I drew up the rest of the alphabet myself. So, I have the alphabet and if I could transfer this into a word processing program (I use a mac) it would allow me to resize quickly and print off my template lettering to then transfer to my work.

I have come across very simple programs where you write an alphabet into small box's and scan it in, but I think I need something a little more sophisticated as the construction of the letters is important as they are often used at 2" - 6"

Any advice would be appreciated,
Thanks,
Jb.

In reply to John Mcshea:

I nearly finished designing a font about ten years ago, starting from a hand-drawn word. I then progressed to a stroke-based alphabet in postscript. Then I discovered that fonts are outline-based, so I converted the characters to outline implementations, using postscript 3rd order bezier curves. Then I found that TrueType fonts don't use bezier curves, they use cubic b-splines. So I wrote a b-spline curve in postscript, and started the tedious process of re-defining the control points by hand. Again. It was about this point that I lost the will to live, and started looking at font design tools.

I recall using a trial version of FontCreator or FontLab, which took in large, high-resolution bitmaps from the postscript (the beauty of postscript is that the image is defined algorithmically, not as a bitmap, so scales perfectly & infinitely), and traced the outline into line-segment approximations of the curved glyphs. I wanted to convert these into proper b-spline definitions, but found that quite painful.

It's likely that things have improved in the last 10 years, and the image to outline extraction may now recognise and fit to proper curves. But I think it's a good idea to start with a proper font design tool to start with, as tweaking the control points until the glyphs look 'right' is a very, very, very tedious process. So I'd agree with the following:

http://www.creativebloq.com/typography/design-your-own-typeface-8133919

<quote>
Like myself, many designers from a graphic design background will naturally opt straight for Adobe Illustrator to start drawing their type. For drawing individual letterforms and experimenting, this is fine. However, it soon becomes obvious that this is simply not the right tool for creating a typeface. From the outset you will benefit from working in an environment that gets you thinking about letter spacing and word creation.
</quote>

The advice in that link looks pretty good, and the links at the end look useful.

Whilst looking at the official DofE logo (in EPS), I noticed that there was a fairly obvious error in the 'D', as it has a re-entrant curve near the base. This can't be right. I got a rather curt reply from the DofE that they'd pass my comments on to their 'professional graphic designer'... They'd used Illustrator, as was evident by the huge package of language extensions in the EPS file. None of which were actually used to draw the logo. So, stripping out all the crap reduced the EPS from 445k to 12k... I now can't look at the logo without seeing the error, unless the logo is very small.

I'm an electronic engineer, not a graphic designer. I remember looking for a good book on the technical aspects of font design (there must be 'rules' about size, shape, kerning, etc.), but the only books I could ever find were "here are a bunch of fonts: aren't they pretty?" books. Maybe with a bit of history of the font, and who designed it.

http://www.high-logic.com/font-editor/fontcreator.html
http://www.glyphsapp.com/
http://mashable.com/2011/11/17/free-font-creation-tools/

Whilst googling, I discovered that my local university apparently runs a renowned course in font design...

http://blog.8faces.com/post/54953271574/day-1-type-design-short-course-read...

Who would have guessed?

In reply to John Mcshea:

Oh, and I've just remembered on of the main problems I had converting from postscript to the font tools:

In both stroke and outline versions, I'd used overlapping elements; e.g. a 'b' was defined as, essentially, an 'o' with an ascender stroke to the left. Sadly outline fonts cannot support overlapping elements, and so the outline for the 'o' had to be terminated at some point where it met the ascender. And, since the 'o' was defined very simply with four bezier curves, I had to truncate the left-hand outer bezier curves where they met the ascender. And finding the exact intercept points of these lines, and the control points for the truncated curves, so that they perfectly matched the 'design intent' proved very hard for me. Because I'm an obsessive nut-bag, and they had to be _perfect_.

I thought about writing some code to find the intercept points, and fit the bezier curves to what I wanted, but I think that was the final straw that made me give up on the project.

Given that it's not impossible to find the intersection between curves, and to do curve fitting (you just need a helpful mathematician), it ought to be possible for a font design tool to allow you to construct fonts by overlapping basic structural elements, and finding the intersect and control points to make the outline-definition glyph. But my recollection is that none of them did, and all points of the font had to be controlled manually.

In reply to captain paranoia:

" they'd pass my comments on to their 'professional graphic designer'..."

I don't think they did...pretty much every example in Google image search shows the same fault. Now I can't help but see it either.

Cezza

In reply to cezza:


<evil>Bwooahahaha...</evil>

In reply to John Mcshea:

There are lot of typefaces out there, can you find one that matches or close enough matches yours?

In reply to Swig:

There are a lot of fonts out there, yes. But, just like apps, it's hard to find one that looks like what you want.

I had quite a long email discussion with a guy from ITC regarding their font browser, since it was done by name. And, if I'm searching for a font by appearance, its name is going to be no use in finding it... And searching thousands of fonts by eye is very tedious.

I suggested a semi-formal typological cataloging of typography... I don't think they even had basics, like serif/sans, or weight; they just had a honking great list. Probably because, pre-digital typography only allowed a fairly small catalogue of fonts to be designed, and they hadn't managed to break free from old skool way of doing things.

Again, things may have improved in the last ten years.

In reply to John Mcshea:

Wow, thanks for the in depth reply captain paranoia, I'll spend the evening going through your notes and links, though I am no programmer...... Yes the DofE is surprising.

Swig - My work often has lettercutting in various fonts and I can often find a suitable one to use simply searching the supplied ones in pages or downloading the odd one from a font supplier. This font is particularly beautiful and suitable for some of my work. I found it surprising myself that with so many fonts available that I couldn't find anything like it, not even near.

In reply to John Mcshea:

Years ago I created some logos as font characters in Corel Draw and created a TTF font. It wasn't actually that tricky but it was quite neat having some company-specific icons available on everyone's keyboards. You used to be able to find older versions of Corel cheap - no idea if that's still the case.

In reply to John Mcshea:


Yes, sorry for the rambling reply. I was trying to lead up to the point that using a tool designed for the job to start with would save time in the end... I know I'm rather unusual in that I hand code PostScript graphics...

The 'seven free font tools' is probably a good starting point.

In reply to John Mcshea:

You'd need some woods and a shidload of concrete.





-Aaah come on, it is a climbing forum

In reply to captain paranoia:

Out of curiosity, I thought I'd look to see if ITC had improved things. Only to find they were taken over in 2005...

http://www.monotype.com/libraries/itc

However, this did lead me to a few font vendors, and it seems that font selection is still pretty hard, even with some typological selection tools

http://www.fonts.com/browse 150,000+ fonts. Gulp. But there's a typological selector which asks a series of questions, and whittles them down to a selection
http://www.linotype.com/116832/ITCLibrary-library.html 16912 fonts...
http://www.myfonts.com

This might be most useful for finding the original font you copied:

http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/

Submit an example image, and it will try to match. Not tried it...

In reply to captain paranoia:

If you head to the What The Font Forum, you can post your sample and some clever font geeks will try to identify it for you. Each entry is marked 'solved or 'unsolved' - looks like they get a lot of enquiries so it might take a while, but I think this might be more successful than the automated finders.

Here's the link:
http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/forum/

If you have an interest in font design and broader typography history, I recommend this book:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Just-My-Type-About-Fonts/dp/1846683025

Not a manual, but an interesting read that will give you decent background knowledge about the subject in general.