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.

Just a quick note about ways of contributing to, and keeping abreast of current discussions and changes at FontStruct.

For RSS junkies there is a plethora of different feeds available. (If you don’t know what RSS is, take a look at this BBC page).

We haven’t actually put any extra RSS buttons on the relevant pages, so just use whatever standard mechanism your browser provides to subscribe. In Firefox for example, you’ll always see the orange RSS icon in the location bar when a feed is available. Click on it to subscribe.

So first of all there is a pooled RSS feed for all comments. Subscribe to this feed and you can keep up with what’s being said about all FontStructions. I like the empty entries in this feed — that usually means someone has uploaded some Artwork.

Secondly, there is a feed for every gallery page. Just set up the gallery the way you want and then subscribe. You can subscribe to a general feed like What’s New to see the latest Top Picks, or you can follow a particular category like Script FontStructions, or even track developments for a specific search term like “Western”.

If you’re particularly interested in one FontStruction or the discussion about it, every FontStruction also has it’s very own RSS feed. Just go to the respective FontStruction’s home page and subscribe.

Last but not least there is of course the feed for this blog.

Other than commenting on FontStructions, there are two places where you can participate in discussion on FontStruct. Commenting on blog posts like this one is one option, and there is also the FontStruct Flickr group. So far, people have used the Flickr group exclusively for sharing artwork made with, or related to FontStruct, but there’s also a fully fledged Discussion forum.

The first change effects the height of the fonts. A lot of people have noticed that FontStructions often have to be set at crazily large point sizes to be legible. This should no longer be the case with fresh downloads. Also the FontStruct icon which is used as the “empty glyph” in every FontStruction is now scaled properly so it doesn’t dwarf other characters.

The second change deals with word spacing. Early on, FontStructors discovered that if you built letters starting one or two bricks to the left of the “LEFT” line, you could get around the automated one-brick-spacing between letters. Until now this trick only worked on the FontStruct website. Now it works for downloaded FontStructions too. So classics like Marshmallow Script, Ice Box or Epiorque Joined should now work as expected without any need for manual spacing. Support for adjusting word spacing in a more intuitive manner is on its way.

One side effect of these improvements is that most fonts downloaded from now on will have slightly different vertical metrics (heights and linespacing) and possibly different horizontal metrics (word spacing).  So if you have used FontStructions in any existing artwork, you may want to make a copy of your old download before you grab an updated version.

As a TypeCon warmup, I’ll be at the Pecha Kucha Night on Tuesday, July 15 presenting FontStruct. Most of what I say won’t be news to veteran ’structors but you should show up anyway to heckle me while I attempt to explain FontStruct in 6 minutes and 40 seconds.

Earlier in the month FontStruct was given even more digital ink from the online magazine Slate. Writer Jason Fagone articulated a reaction we’ve experienced many times here in our office:

“… as often happens in art, aesthetic limitations breed creativity. The most ambitious FontStruct users have created letterforms so ornate you’d never believe they’re derived from a set of prefab shapes.”

As well as the pure joy in using the app:

“This instant-gratification quality is the true appeal of FontStruct … There’s something about that moment when your own letters begin to flash across the screen.”

Rounding up the recent press coverage is a plug from one of our favorite magazines, ReadyMade, with a fitting metaphor:

“The process is a little reminiscent of Tetris, but without the overwhelming feeling that sets in when the pieces start dropping at an impossibly rapid pace.”

Wonderfully put. In the interest of keeping FontStruct stress free, we promise not to add any obnoxious video game music or imposing time limits to the editor in the near future. As for FontStructions inspired by Tetris, that we whole-heartedly support.

You’ll find the new bricks at the bottom of the “All Bricks” panel. Thanks to Diego Sans Salas for spelling out why these will be useful.

Update:

Due to popular demand we’ve added some more bricks to represent all permutations for the elongated triangle shape:

Conference registration is sold out, but we’re on a stage in an area with free public access, so if you’re in the neighborhood, please stop by, especially if you have any questions or suggestions for the FontStruct team.

Read more about the FontStruct presentation here.