Using the Desire Fonts in Xara

[angelize]

Hey everyone I recently splurged and bought Desire an awesome open type font with hundreds of alternates ligatures and other extras and the neat thing about it is it comes with a set of 11 fonts that contain all that extra open type good stuff with out the need of a glyph palette. And I discovered an easy way to use those extras in Xara! At first I tried using the Windows Character Map but that was really a pain. Desire comes with a pdf guide to all the 11 extra fonts so I started using the pdf guide and Xara's Font gallery (this about the only time I used it) Once I type out the text I select the letter that I want to change and once I've looked up the alternate in the pdf guide I select the font that contains it by double clicking and then just type the corresponding letter or symbol for the alternate that I want.

[mwenz]

Desire is one of the few fonts with OT features that (now) have the various characters accessible in that way. Much less a pdf guide.

No thanks. I'll keep using a single font in other applications and if I have need to use XDP for a particular job (I'm glad I have choices), I'll compose the text in CD and convert to curves for use in XDP.

This is what it is like in a particular, modern application using OT Features:



XDP absolutely needs OT Feature support added in the very next version. It's about time.

[angelize]

Oh I absolutely agree Mike. My little workaround only works with Desire because of all those extra fonts and the pdf guide and it is a real pain to have to install 11 extra fonts just to use Desire in Xara programs. I only did it just to see if I could do it , and for those that don't have another program to turn to it is a workaround that would allow them to use this beautiful font.

I totally agree that real OT feature support is way overdue in Xara programs

[mwenz]

Hi Frances,

I was looking through some heavier brush script fonts for an ad and ran across another that has the main font's stylistic sets, swashes, etc., spread into multiple fonts for non-OT feature aware applications. If ya want, I'll post the linky. It's a mere $15.

Mike

[iamtheblues]

This thread is quite elderly now, but there is a handy workaround for using the glyphs in Xara, which is actually on the LHF Desire webpage (link).
It is the Glyph Copier, which can be found here (highlighted in my attached screenshot). Also of interest is this short video by Charles Borges de Oliveira, the font's designer,
which I found very interesting viewing. This is on the same webpage as the link and is accessed by clicking on the 3rd. graphic down on the left hand side which starts the video.
I've added a graphic to this post to explain it more clearly.
Bob.

[Big Frank]

that is one hell of a feature full typeface
the work that must have gone into that
i hope he's making money from that
hours and hours of work