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

[Gare]

By all means, the more the sharing, the better the type world!

But if someone is inspired by the content on TalkGraphics to do a knock-out piece of OpenTyperry or TrueTypography, I'd like first dibs to be posted >>>Here on TG's new Typography Area<<<

Fair enough, Mike?

My Best,

—Gary

[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.