March 2012 Xara Vector Grunge Effects by iamtheblues Guest Tips and Trick Tutorial

[mwenz]

Oh absolutely. I didn't mean to imply anything else.

T&G will receive my first (re)creation from my American Specimen Book Of Type Styles...

Mike

[Gare]

Now THAT sounds exciting, Mike!

Yay! Go for it, man! Did you get my PM about font editors?

-g-

[mwenz]

I got your email <g>...

Yep, I have downloaded the trial of TypeTool. Playing around before dinner I took a copy of a Garamond-like font and made some small caps, moved some of the numbers around for old-style number and am still playing a bit to get use to the tool set.

Next I'll start scanning some pages, turn the scans into vector in Xara, do the export/import into TT and see how it goes. Once I have some progress, I'll begin a thread and maybe make a few posts on the progress.

Take care, Mike

[Gare]

Agreed, Mike, certainly the tool set in Type Tool is different than Xara. It's much like Illustrator, though, expecially the need for three different tools to define a control point (also called a knot, an anchor, and a node, depending on the software company).

First, you can import AI files to a character window in TT, so you can indeed use Xara to build your characters (albeit one by one); you just export one character per Xara page as an Illustrator (*.AI) file, and make sure all your paths are combined because fonts can only have one path, although several joined subpaths are indeed allowed.

Me, I prefer to design in Xara—the tools are simply quicker, and more than make up for the time spent exporting. Accuracy and detail I gain by using Xara.

However—Here's a slightly annotated cheat sheet of Type Tools 3's tool set. It's big brother FontLab has a few more tools, but not $300 more!




Remember to right-click when you use the pointer thing tool; TT is context sensitive and you got options with every tool. Be careful right-clicking directly over a control point, though. I think that's the shortcut gesture for deleting the underlying control point.

—g

[wizard509]

I worked this one to death, and it still isn't very good.

[Soquili]

Looks very interesting Larry.

I noticed this month's Xara Outsider mistakenly attributed Bob's guest tutorial to me.

[wizard509]

I liked some of the effects I was getting with this one. Well Bill, Bob did a very nice tutorial, too bad I struggled with it so hard. I have followed the tutorial as best I can, over and over but always I seem to have problems. The last attempt has been the closest to success, but, I started trying something extra to it and ran into significant problems. I got it done, then used the 3Dtool on it and added a shadow and my poor computer would grind away trying to do what I asked but it took forever. Actually it didn't really want to do what I asked so even trying to add a shadow was a problem, change the trans. of the shadow was a problem, changing colors was a problem, so I am wondering if I need a better graphics card. Would Xara benefit from a dedicated graphics card? This is getting off topic, sorry about that.