Kerning Part 2:
Kerning in FontLab VI

In Part 1 of this 2 part series I covered the kerning list. It detailed how I checked whether things were properly spaced in the first place, and how to figure out which pairs need kerned. In this post I will cover the rest of the actual kerning process: Creating kerning classes in FontLab VI The act of kerning itself Testing The assumption at this [...]

2019-03-04T18:29:37-08:00March 5th, 2019|Categories: How, Type|Tags: , , , , , |

Kerning Part 1:
the Kerning List

Kerning! It’s the last thing one does before one finishes a font. That means I’m almost done with Protest! What is kerning? I expect if you’ve read this far in the series, you probably know. But for those who might not: Kerning is the adjustment of space between a specific pair of glyphs. While spacing is adjusting the sidebearings of a given glyph for all [...]

2019-02-28T14:58:53-08:00February 27th, 2019|Categories: How, Type|Tags: , , , , |

Adding OpenType Features in FontLab VI, Part 5: Composite Marks

The previous post covered alternates, especially contextual alternates. It’s a long one, and packed with info goodies. This post chronicles my journey into the mark and mkmk features. These features are for piecing together composite glyphs from base glyphs and diacritic marks using anchors. Spoiler: I didn’t get this to work properly, then realized I didn’t need it anyway. But here’s what I learned, in [...]

2018-11-30T13:45:32-08:00November 30th, 2018|Categories: How, Type|Tags: , , , , , , , |

Adding OpenType Features in FontLab VI, Part 4: Alternates

In the last post I wrote about features that were relatively minor for Protest (fractions, ordinals, diacritics for caps, and ligatures). Here’s what I’m covering in this post in the feature order for Protest™ (in bold): script language specific forms (locl) fractions (frac, numr, dnom) ordinals (ordn) all caps (case) various alternates (calt, salt, ss01, ss02, ss…) ligatures (liga, dlig) manual alternate access (aalt) What [...]

2018-11-27T13:08:36-08:00November 27th, 2018|Categories: How, Type|Tags: , , , , , , , , |

Adding OpenType Features in FontLab VI, Part 3: Housekeeping

In the last post I wrote about adding local language rules in the locl feature of my Protest™ font. This post covers the things that were relatively minor for Protest. I need to give a caveat here. My font has specific needs (as any font does), and compared to text types is limited in scope. So while these features are minor for Protest, they could [...]

2018-11-22T23:20:54-08:00November 23rd, 2018|Categories: How, Type|Tags: , , , , , |

Adding OpenType Features in FontLab VI, Part 2: Local Language Feature

Last time I wrote an introduction to adding OpenType features to Protest. I included links to the resources I used most or found helpful. Reading those materials is foundational, and highly recommended. There are two types of features: substitutional and positional. The substitution features come first. This post covers local language rules in the locl substitution feature. Of the substitution features, here’s where I am [...]

2018-11-19T21:30:53-08:00November 20th, 2018|Categories: How, Type|Tags: , , , , , , , |

Adding OpenType Features in FontLab VI, Part 1: Overview

My last post was about adding lots and lots of alternates to my Protest™ font in FontLab VI. This time I'm writing about adding OpenType features to Protest. This includes stuff like language support and cycling through alternates. I’m only going to cover a portion of the OT features in this post, because there’s a lot. I’ll cover more in future posts as I learn. [...]

2018-11-16T12:07:06-08:00November 16th, 2018|Categories: How, Type|Tags: , , , , , |

Adding Alternates in FontLab VI

In my last post I documented what I did to add diacritics to my Protest font in FontLab VI. This post is about adding alternates to Protest. And there are a lot of alternates. However, having already added glyphs to FontLab VI, and having already added diacritics, the process is fairly straightforward. Preparatory Work In another blog post I mentioned that I'd been drawing and [...]

2018-10-18T12:24:02-08:00October 18th, 2018|Categories: How, Type|Tags: , , , , , , , , |

Adding Diacritics in FontLab VI

In my last blog post I wrote about doing test prints with specimen sheets and looking at typographic color. It dealt primarily with the basic Latin alphabet and figures. Now I'm ready to push into accented characters, expanding the Latin glyph set to include greater language support. In this post I document what I did to add diacritics to my Protest font in FontLab VI, [...]

2018-10-08T10:55:17-08:00October 10th, 2018|Categories: How, Type|Tags: , , , |

Testing, Specimen Sheets,
& Typographic Color

In the last blog post I wrote about how I space a font in FontLab VI using the Tracy Method, based on Walter Tracy's 1986 book, Letters of Credit: A View of Type Design. This time I'm going over how I test that spacing and look for areas of improvement. The ideal for the font (for most any font) is even typographic color, and that's [...]

2018-09-28T09:05:04-08:00October 3rd, 2018|Categories: How, Type|Tags: , , , , |

Title

Go to Top