Customizing the Interface

The interface of the FontStructor is quite flexible. As you become more experience in using the editor, you may look for additional features or wish to clear the screen of superfluous elements. Here are some tips on customizing the interface.

Panning and Zooming

You can use the zoom slider to make your letters appear bigger or smaller on the screen:

Zoom slider

You can also zoom in and out using the ‘ +’ and ‘ -’ keys, or by using the wheel on your mouse if you have one.

To pan (move the whole canvas around), you need to use the hand tool, or hold down the spacebar and click and drag anywhere on the squared canvas.

Extra Guides

The ‘BASELINE’ and ‘LEFT’ guides are always visible, but sometimes it may be useful to have a couple more, adjustable guidelines, so you can mark the general vertical and horizontal size of your letters. To turn these extra guides on and off, you can use the ‘Advanced’ menu at the top of the screen as shown.

Extra Guides

The two new guides can be dragged and dropped to the desired positions. Font Experts please note that these guides currently have no effect on font metrics.

Minimal Mode

If you really know your keyboard shortcuts, and you don’t need to add any more bricks, you may well want to switch to minimal mode. In this mode, almost all panels disappear from the screen. No distractions, it’s just you and the grid. Again this option can be turned on and off from the ‘Advanced’ menu.

Similarly you can turn off the grid visibility from the same menu, for an even more minimalist experience.

Adjacent Characters

This is an experimental feature which displays adjacent characters from the current character set to the left and right of the current letter. The idea is to assist in creating a coherent, stylistically uniform FontStruction by allowing an ongoing comparison between letters. Expect this feature to be enhanced in the future. It’s selected from the ‘Advanced’ menu.

Full Screen Mode

If you don't like the feeling of working in a browser, choose this option from the ‘Advanced’ menu. There is a technical limitation however - you cannot use the keyboard in this mode. The only key that does anything is the ‘ESC’ key which is used to exit full screen mode.