What I Did Today

I’d made 2 fonts using MyScriptFont.com and though they looked nice they still required more tweaking. I decided to buy FontCreator since it’s on sale. Though the line “FontCreator Home Edition can NOT be used for commercial purposes. You have to buy the Standard or Professional Edition instead” still bothers me. I mean, what’s the justification for that? It just feels arbitrary to say, “No, you don’t have the right to sell something you make with this version.” It’s like deciding amongst the different versions of Windows that exist largely so they can charge you more for them.

I also installed it in a Wine Wrapper to cut down on programs running at once.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

The only issue I ran into was the Preview window wouldn’t respond to the mouse. I disabled it since I can run a tester that generates lorem ipsum and various other things as well as letting you type. Now I can revise this font and make variants should the need arise. I’ll probably be offering fonts in the future as they’d be perfect weekend projects to take on.

Today I planned for an art day after spending 2 days working on fonts. I was thinking about the layout for my next webcomic. I’d been moving towards a horizontal design but I realized vertical works better for the format. The templates I’d made so far looked bunched up especially when I resized them for the web. I spent most of the day working out the max and min sizes and from there extrapolated a working print size to draw in. (Of course I’ll probably end up resizing things should I print them later but it’s good to just have a working standard for now.)

The evening’s been busy. Got a haircut, grabbed Taco Bell, bought groceries, and worked on travel plans. I’d like to spend tomorrow actually doing some drawing and inking. I think I’ll sit down with the new drawing size and see how I like working in it. It feels more spacious so I’ll have more room for the words. I just need to make sure I use the space well. Have to resist the urge to stretch panels out instead of drawing anything new. I may end up cropping it down if it feels too big.

Spent the morning importing glyphs, drawing some I was missing, and fiddling with the spacing in FontCreator. Then I discovered the trial version doesn’t allow exporting.

Yeah, that’s a limitation I’d rather have known up front.

This evening I downloaded the trial for Glyphs. I’ve also been tinkering with Birdfont. I tried FontForge but it’s pretty confusing. I’ll probably go back to FontCreator eventually since it supports importing more easily. The others want you to redraw everything in their editor, which I could understand if I didn’t spend my design time in programs I’m more used to.

Today I worked on building a new font out of my handwriting. I’d previously downloaded a template from MyScriptFont.com to practice sizing and consistency. I’ve been drawing vector letters in Manga Studio using a lettering nib from Ray Frenden’s brush set. I decided to try FontCreator again as I’d used it in the past. It’s Windows-only but I got it running in CrossOver. Also been considering FontLab Studio since they have a Mac version but figured I’d see how useful my previous experience is.

Thus far I’ve imported both upper and lower case glyphs. I’ve saved files for other characters but haven’t added them yet. Once I’ve got them all in and sized relatively the same I can fiddle with spacing, kerning, ligatures, and other fancy font terms. I’ll probably make a few variations as I refine things. It’s a little weird making a font because I’m trying to draw ideal versions of what letters look like when I write them. It’s more noticeable on the lower case, which for dialogue shouldn’t matter much since caps read better, but I want to make the font full for multiple uses. I’m just having flashbacks of grammar school writing rows of letters.