August 21, 2009
Updates to FontStruct Live and FontStructor
The FontStruct team is continuously adding new features to the website and to FontStructor, working hard to keep the demanding FontStruct community satisfied.
Today we are happy to announce three small but important updates: integration of Flickr and tweets from other users into FontStruct Live, expansion of the arabic character set and the long awaited implementation of copy & paste between different FontStructions
Integration of Flickr and Twitter into FontStruct Live
FontStruct Live has transformed the FontStruct experience. One month after its release, it is hard to imagine how we managed to keep track of all the updates in the community without it.
With a better communication infra-structure, FontStructors have been able to focus on what matters most: FontStructing. Every new week has brought more and better FontStructions, and we had to augment the capacity of Featured FontStruction from one to several fonts to acommodate all the amazing new work produced by the community.
Last week Rob silently plugged the FontStruct Flickr pool into FontStruct Live, so new images and comments on Flickr are automatically displayed on the feed.
This week we are introducing another addition to FontStruct Live: now not only our own FontStruct tweets, but any tweet including the magic #fontstruct tag is displayed in the feed. We hope this will bring even more integration to our community and bring FontStruct to even more people out there.
FontStructors on Twitter – say hello!
Arabic glyph sets
Being online and free, FontStruct can be used by anyone anywhere in the world to build fonts. We are well aware of the importance and the challenge of supporting alphabets other than latin.
Today we are happy to announce the expansion of our arabic character set to support initial, medial and final variations necessary for high-quality arabic typography. This still doesn’t mean full support for arabic (read notes below), but it is an important step in this direction.
A few notes about current support for arabic in FontStruct:
- The FontStructor uses fonts installed on your system to display the glyphs in the Character Selector bar. Users who don’t have unicode fonts installed on their systems might experience empty glyph slots, or slots filled with a placeholder glyph. We recommend users willing to access the full extended arabic character to install the free arabic unicode font Scheherazade.
- There is currently no support for right-to-left text in the preview window.
- Fonts generated by FontStruct don’t include OpenType shaping features for the arabic script (but these can be added with other tools such as FontLab Studio or MS VOLT).
We would greatly appreciate feedback from arabic designers – let us know what you think.
Copy and paste between FontStructions
And finally, the feature that all FontStructors have been waiting for – copy & paste between different FontStructions is finally possible!
It works as expected: simply open two FontStructions at once (in different tabs or windows), select and copy bricks from one glyph in the first FontStruction and paste them into another glyph in the second.
We believe this little feature will greatly improve the productivity of work with FontStructor – Enjoy!
Note: This update involved changes in the way FontStruct uses a sort of “cookie” that saves user preferences like palette positions, zoom factor, last letter edited etc. These changes mean that users will lose the current workspace snapshot.
