Improvements to the FontStructor
We’ve released an updated version of the FontStructor. Clear your browser caches, reload and enjoy. Here’s a quick rundown on the new features:
New “Current Letter” Window
There’s a new window in the interface titled “Current Letter”. This contains an example character for the letter you are currently editing and underneath, the name of this character. The universally-despised, floaty, sticky “Next Letter” and “Previous Letter” buttons are now more sensibly integrated into this new, moveable window.
Rollover examples in the Character Selector bar
Rolling over any character in the Character Selector bar will now give you a larger tooltip containing a larger example character and the character name.
Better and wider range of Fonts used in the Character Selector bar
Many of you have noticed that many characters have not been displayed properly in the Character Selector bar. Slots have either been empty or the “null” glyph, a placeholder has been displayed. This has been especially problematic for non-latin characters.
It’s difficult to solve this problem completely because the FontStructor uses the fonts installed on your system to display these characters, and these fonts vary greatly, but we have made some changes which should improve matters. People using OSX and Windows should notice an improvement immediately. Coverage should improve further if users (on any platform) download and install the public domain fonts DejaVu Sans, and/or the very extensive GNU Unifont.
Expert Info
If you choose “Expert Info” from the “View” submenu under “Advanced” you will see the unicode codepoint values for the relevant character, both in the Current Letter Palette and when rolling-over letters in the Character Selector bar. If we add any further such expert features they will probably also be toggled on and off using this option.
Optimized Saving
Saving should now be noticeably faster, in particular for FontStructions which use many bricks or have many characters.
By Rob Meek (meek) | link | 14 Comments
Thank you! I’ve just started working on diacritics and extra Latin characters and the roll-over features are going to be a tremendous help.
Comment by Dave — August 15, 2008 #
thank you!!
Comment by steve cooley — August 15, 2008 #
The only thing, and this is super minor compared to the enormous improvements these are, would be to have a dotted rectangle in the current letter window to illustrate where the glyph should be placed relative to the baseline. But, having the unicode number is a *huge* help, and is probably adequate, so never mind and thank you again!
Comment by steve cooley — August 15, 2008 #
@steve
Yes, I realised that whilst writing this post, and trying to draw a “Reversed Esh Loop”. I don’t even know what an Esh is, and then they go looping and reversing it ;-) A baseline reference would have helped.
On the other hand, if I don’t know a glyph well enough to know where it should sit relative to a baseline, maybe some research beyond the editor would be a good idea anyway. This looks like quite a good place to explore the lesser know corners of unicode:
http://www.decodeunicode.org
Comment by Rob Meek (meek) — August 15, 2008 #
Oops, I can see clearly now that the area at end of Latin Extended B I have been using for extraneous characters is actually reserved for other glyphs. I just don’t yet have an installed font that supports them (time to finally activate DejaVu Sans)!
Most helpful, now I only need to reference the glyph palette to look at variations of a given glyph. Thanks Rob!
Comment by williaum — August 15, 2008 #
The zoom letter feature is very nice. You get a better idea whether this character has the umlaut on it or grave or whatever. Thanks.
Although, while on the subject of improvements, I must point out the inadequacy of the Arabic support. I don’t profess to know the requirements for all languages of the world, but being from Pakistan, I know Urdu (and Arabic, since Urdu is its direct descendant). The Arabic tab has 235 characters. I counted. However, they are all, what may be called, the uppercase equivalent of Latin character set. While English (and other Latin based scripts) are perfectly readable in uppercase only, Arabic (and all its derivatives) are never (that’s NEVER) written in uppercase only. Hence, the current level of support for Arabic might as well not exist–because it is unusable.
Unlike the two variations of Latin script (upper- and lowercase) Arabic based scripts have four variations for each character: full character glyph (which is the only form currently available in FontStruct); initial (character glyph when it comes at the beginning of a word or when it follows a non-joining character); medial (character glyph in between two other characters); and terminal (character glyph at the end of a word or preceding a non-joining character). All four variants are needed to write out Arabic scripts. I’ve often thought to develop an Arabic font in FontStruct, but without the availability of the remaining three forms of the character, there really is no point. The font will be just for show, providing no functionality whatsoever. Unless all that IS available in FontStruct and I haven’t found it, in which case, I am an ass.
I only say this in case this fact is not known. Most likely, FontShop is well aware of this, probably in far greater detail than I. Still, if required, I’d be glad to help if I could be of some assistance.
In any case, keep up the good work.
I.Love.FontStruct.
:D
Comment by thalamic — August 18, 2008 #
@thalamic.
Thanks for your offer.
This is something you really could help on. I’ll mail you directly about this.
It’s quite simple to add extra characters, as long as they are part of unicode. Adding too many would cause some problems, that’s why we don’t unfortunately cover the full chinese alphabet, but it would be great to improve the character set for Arabic. Input from someone who knows the character set well would really help.
Comment by Rob Meek (meek) — August 20, 2008 #
I resolved a diacritical issue in one of my typefaces. Yay!
To williaum: This is why I began using 2 typefaces when I needed them. Dragon of the Seas 2 was quick to arrive, then there was Freeman Industrial 2.
In fact, DotS/2 has Mac commands in it.
Comment by Raymie — August 23, 2008 #
My I suggest adding new tiles like these:
http://img529.imageshack.us/img529/2643/tilesrn9.png
I’ve often found that I need tiles that look like this, but there aren’t any.
Then another problem I that I’ve had recently is that changes to my FontStruction aren’t changed when I save. I save many times during the work, and then when I wan’t to quit I just click the “My FontStruction” tab, and when it asks if I want to save I click “yes”. But when I view my font, none of the changes are there. If I go back to editing it, all the changes are still gone. Does anyone know what’s wrong?
Comment by Zefyrinus — August 26, 2008 #
I would actually rather a feature where you can upload images of perhaps your own handwriting, then you can slowly trace your handwriting again into the program. That would be an interesting feature, something I haven’t seen anywhere in any freeware font creators
Comment by Derek — August 31, 2008 #
Derek – because FontStruct is a modular editor by nature it’s not the best environment for converting handwriting into a font. For that I would suggest ScanFont or a professional service like HandFont.
Comment by Stephen Coles — September 10, 2008 #
One suggestion would be so that you could apply one block over another
Comment by mojah — December 1, 2008 #
Nice features! I’d love to be able to manually adjust the width of every character (i.e. make underscores close to each other with no space etc.) – I spoke to Rob about it some time ago, any chance that would come soon?
Also, I noticed that my Flash Debug Player 10 is complaining very often when viewing gallery, maybe that’s something to do with the new security policies?
Comment by Og2t — December 17, 2008 #
@Og2t Manual width adjustment is coming soon.
The problems with the Flash Player are to do with the switch to a new server a few days ago. They should be fixed now.
Comment by Rob Meek (meek) — December 17, 2008 #