The tg Font Collaboration Thread

[Soquili]

Sounds good Gary.

[mwenz]

#16248G kicked my bottom. Not so much the drawing of it, but getting a clean AI file into TT. Gave up on that so in the ZIP file is also TT's VFB file--the character is in the M position (not that it won't be obvious).

Take care, Mike

[Christine Farrelly]

Do we need to sign up again for the sequel? If so consider me signed up.

Another source of images that may be useful is http://store.doverpublications.com/index.html - they provide weekly free samples of the clip art in many of their publications which I understand are all out of the copyright period. Unfortunaterly they do not ship to the UK.

Christine

[Gare]

@Mike—

The glyph looks beautiful and I don't see missing control points in the vfb file compared to the Xara file, although they might be microscopic, eh?

Suggestions:

1.) Submit the Xara file to us if/when there's a glyph you suspect is not traveling from Xara to EPS to Type Tool v3 correctly. I have a roundabout method for forcing glyphs to transfer accurately, and I won't keep it a secret: Xara -->CMX-->CorelDRAW -->Type 1, and then I copy the Type 1 to a new FontLab template. Stupid, but it works.

2. Use Illustrator *.AI instead of EPS as the file type to export to FontLab. Illustrator has a much smaller set of page description commands in the internal dictionary than PostScript=less to muck up.

@Christine-consider yourself signed up! I'm in New York and yes I am signed up for the free clipart of the week from Dover. Some of it is useful, fewer pieces are useful for fonts, fewer still are of a resolution that the human eye could accurately trace off. They're hardly giving away the farm, but it's a good resource on occasion.

The P.D. book Barbara dug up—one of them—has pages like this sample. If we can invent the characters not shown, we could have a spectacular typeface to offer to the world via tg. And there's still more for me to sift through.

[mwenz]

From Xara, it doesn't matter if one uses the AI extension or EPS extension, they are identical files. Here is an example section of the AI import I cleaned up in TT:



Note the (small) yellow nodes. In this screen shot, you can actually see bunged up lines as well. In XDP, there is a single node at each position, with the nodes being smooth nodes. In TT, the one at the right is only 2 nodes on top of each other, the other 3 nodes. In other cases there can be more extra nodes and many nodes change from smooth or cusp/corner and no longer represented as a smooth arc.

In any case, I'll probably clean them up in TT and also attach that file with the XDP file because the changes bug me...

Take care, Mike--cannot wait to see the whoel thing as a font. Thank you for doing this, Gary.

[mwenz]

... one of Mike's...

Posts 8, 14 and 42 have a total of four of my attempts. I'm a workin' on more...

Take care, Mike

[Soquili]

Just to show I am actually doing something

So far I have 8 of the 10 completed and have a test font using those to see how they look on screen and how they print.

The .xar file contains the font rather than the source drawings. Please let me know if the font embedded and can be seen.

[mwenz]

Embedded great, Bill.



Mike

[Soquili]

Thanks Mike.

Did the font embed in the .xar file?

[mwenz]

Yeppers.