Comments on: Improvements to the FontStructor

By: Rob Meek (meek)

Rob Meek (meek) — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:50:47 +0000

@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.

By: Og2t

Og2t — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 13:34:49 +0000

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?

By: mojah

mojah — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 12:47:57 +0000

One suggestion would be so that you could apply one block over another

By: Stephen Coles

Stephen Coles — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 01:59:00 +0000

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.

By: Derek

Derek — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 12:36:09 +0000

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

By: Zefyrinus

Zefyrinus — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 10:56:08 +0000

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?

By: Raymie

Raymie — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 05:04:41 +0000

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.

By: Rob Meek (meek)

Rob Meek (meek) — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 07:43:22 +0000

@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.

By: thalamic

thalamic — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 17:18:40 +0000

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

By: williaum

williaum — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 20:26:35 +0000

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!