tcarisland
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Posts posted by tcarisland
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I'm a type designer, I started out creating fonts recently after I bought Affinity Designer and I was teaching myself to work with vector graphics.
I've created several color fonts and a few variable fonts.
It's a shame that I can't use Affinity Designer or Affinity Photo to create mockups and promo images for my fonts. For that I have to resolve to either making screenshots of color fonts or variable fonts in the browser of Pixelmator Pro since I do my best to avoid Adobe software.
The most annoying thing for me is that no one at Serif seems to think this is the least bit important. There's a whole cottage industry for special display fonts and both variable fonts and color fonts are supported by nearly all major browsers.
https://caniuse.com/variable-fonts
https://caniuse.com/?search=COLR%2FCPAL
If Affinity Designer supported variable fonts or color fonts it would be an invaluable resource not only for creating promo images, but for testing and quality control, because now a lot of my design process is a shot in the dark.
Variable fonts
https://www.creativefabrica.com/product/demodulator/
https://www.creativefabrica.com/product/montebello/
Color fonts:
https://www.creativefabrica.com/product/tuscan-modular-2/ (SVG)
https://www.creativefabrica.com/product/16-segment-display/ (COLR/CPAL)
https://www.creativefabrica.com/product/cardboard-cutout/ (COLR/CPAL) -
Drawing ellipses and the likes of it is a real pain when it comes to perspective.
Would you consider creating an isometric version of the polygon tools so that we can create ellipses, rounded rectangles and regular rectangles directly in one of the three axes?
This would be a real time saver, especially combined with boolean operations.
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On 28/07/2017 at 6:58 PM, reglico said:
Hi tcarisland,
After performing the "Divide" operation, select the center parts and delete them.
That's monkey work, especially when working with tens to hundreds of shapes.
This is just one of my many drafts for a font, and for this font alone I need to delete 32 shapes, probably multiple times since design works in iterations, meaning that for 4 iterations I'm easily up to 128 click and delete operations for just one font, now let's say click and delete takes 4 seconds on average, that's 512 seconds of nothing but clicking and deleting for one design that might not even get accepted, meaning I've wasted 8.5 minutes on each font for something that could be done instantaneously.
As I already mentioned, Adobe Illustrator has a boolean add that fixes this problem, AD doesn't, but switching between my Mac and PC is annoying since I only have AI for Windows and I prefer working on my Mac.
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The "Divide" operation almost does the job, but not exactly. What I get is this:
As you can see, I end up with some shapes "filled in" that I don't want to have to remove, if not for the center shapes, I wouldn't have to use my old copy of Illustrator for this particular job.
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I find that using the "Add" operation Affinity Designer creates one big "curve" instead of grouping together all disconnected curves and only removes the overlap of overlapping curves like Adobe Illustrator does. Personally I like both features, but a lot of the time I need the AI feature because I work a lot with type design and I need individual and/or disconnected shapes to remain as separate shapes.
There's a feature lacking in nearly every vector graphics program, and that is the ability to use the subtract operation on a group of curves with another group of disconnected curves. In quite a few instances I find I want to do this, and this is the situation where AD is superior to AI since I can use the boolean "add" to create two big compound curves and then run the subtract, but after this I might want to split this curve up into individual shapes.
So what I'm asking for is the ability to split up complex curves where there's disconnected shapes into individual curves.
Could you also create a snapping mode that only allows integral coordinates? And make snapping available for the bezier parameter nodes (the ones that modify the curvature of the shape)?
I'd also like a feature where I can iterate over curves or groups and name them one by one, just display shape - write name - hit enter - display shape - write name - etc...
I'm still missing a precise line or pen tool feature where I can click on a coordinate, then enter the length and angle or just vector coordinates, and a "move" feature where I can move by length and angle or by vector coordinates, the "transform" box almost does this job, but not entirely.
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A few months ago, my employer (a "mom and pop" frame store that, among other things, produce their own frames) asked me to dig up an image, put on the logo, the website and the frame size and create what he called a "face paper" for our locally produced frames.
So I dug up a photograph of a fox I took five years ago at a park and did just that.
The art boards came in handy, but this type of job feels like something I should have done in InDesign or the upcoming Publisher.
This is the result.
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It's not really about photo editing, but the most useful book I ever read on Photography is one titled "Light Science and Magic: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting" by Fil Hunter and Steven Biver.
There are so many books on photo editing out there and they all seem to touch on the same boring old stuff you can read about in any magazine (too bad the magazines are more expensive than actual books these days). The more interesting books on what you can do with a tool like Affinity Photo and Designer are the ones on digital painting techniques, so you could look there.
And if you're really prepared to bite the bullet and learn how to work with images on a more basic level, Andrew Loomis wrote a whole series of great books on illustration, composition and drafting techniques.
Other than that, I've found that learning how to use tools like Affinity Photo and Designer is way easier from youtube tutorials and the likes of it.
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A few months ago, I started designing fonts using Affinity Designer and Fontforge. I came across a few repetetive tasks and made a small utility program to avoid this problem.
Now I have 5 fonts on my DaFont profile and 6 on CreativeFabrica for sale and thought I'd make the program I use available to others, yesterday I started working on a GUI-application that resizes all SVG files within a directory so that exported SVGs from Affinity Designer retain their relative size.
The program is available on my website along with a short tutorial here.
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I've been working on this for the past month trying to design fonts using AD, exporting glyphs and importing into FontForge.
As of yet, my best solution has been to name all curves/groups, so uppercase A is either just A or AU, and lowercase a is al.
Then I go into the export persona and I created an export preset called "GlyphExport" which is simply .svg format with ViewBox checked and make sure that NOTHING will be rasterized. Then it creates SVG files such as al.svg and A.svg. I'm considering learning how to script for FontForge to import all properly named files, but as of yet I find it fairly straightforward to use the FF hotkeys.After that I made a simple java program to resize the ViewBox to a desired size such as 1024, 1000 or 2048. I can share the code if you're interested.
Finding and setting the ascender and descender is as simple as creating a document with the size of 2048X2048 or 1000X1000 and using the letters A and g, I also use this too find the ratio I need to use to resize my document to make sure the glyphs are the right size. I note down the way I resize in the document using the text tool and locking it.
I have a little video of some of my early workflow before I made the java program on my website www.tcarisland.com
- xoneeleven, toupee and goen
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I looked at the online tool Glypher and Birdfont, none of which were any better.
FontForge has a learning curve and a few very annoying UI issues, for example: to move an object, you need to open a window and plot how many points you want to move it, it's a good thing you can plot numbers, but there should be a mouse option just to move the object as well. Later on I found that with a bit of programming knowledge and learning to use a calculator while designing makes it pretty easy to use with experience.
I still would never consider doing the actual vector design in FontForge though, that part just seems entirely useless to me.
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Around three weeks ago I started designing fonts using Affinity Designer and FontForge.
I do nearly all the design in Affinity Designer and basically just the font specific stuff in FontForge.
Then, about a week ago I tried my luck at submitting my fonts to DaFont, three of them were accepted, and after my first was accepted I was contacted by this Dutch company called Creative Fabrica to submit my fonts for commercial licensing there, pretty surprised since my experience with working with stock photography and illustration was that it was kind of difficult to have things accepted.
The font I have on Creative Fabrica is here:
https://www.creativefabrica.com/product/borgen-monospace/
The fonts I have on DaFont are here:
http://www.dafont.com/borgen.font
http://www.dafont.com/klubkatz.font
http://www.dafont.com/invertedstencil.font
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The extraneous node problem caused by expanding the stroke and boolean operations, not to mention the generally buggy way the boolean operations work made it really difficult for me to create an "extruded font" yesterday.
I've reported the problem before, but it doesn't seem to be a priority.
I also asked for the ability to move objects at a specified angle without response a couple of months ago, I know how to do this mathematically, but would prefer not having to whip out a calculator for something so easy to program.
I don't mean to sound overly pessimistic, but yesterday I was forced to use Illustrator on a pretty slow Laptop because AD doesn't:
Expand strokes well enough
Boolean tools are buggy and
No numerical "move by" option.
I'd rather use AD for everything if I could, but expanding strokes and union, add and intersection are pretty much "bread and butter" for vector graphics.
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Like tcarisland, I use fonts for other codes (for product labels, part bins and the like). Perhaps unlike tcarisland, I use paid for fonts that do not need any intervention but the numbers for the code.
If you're using Code128 or similar, no amount of font design can make it work just by typing in the letters. Code 93 and Code 128 needs a start and stop character at beginning of the barcode and use a checksum right before the end character. You can use online services to preprocess the text before you use the font, pay for a service or as me, just code the checksum yourself.
I made a very basic java program that covers the alphanumeric parts of Code128B here: https://github.com/tcarisland/utility-functions/blob/master/Java/Code128.java
You can of course pay for a program that does this for you, but it sounds very strange that you can just use the font directly.
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Barcoding can be done through using special barcode fonts.
In the case of Code128 or other fonts of that class you need to calculate the checksum and concatenate the beginning and end characters.
Which barcodes are you talking about? UPC, EAN? If you're doing inventory or personal use you probably don't want to mess with those since they're regulated, not to mention very limited since they're strictly numeric.
Are you talking about 2D barcodes like QR-codes?
This is a pretty complex subject that might require a LOT of programming and may not benefit the major amount of users here.
Also, barcodes and barcode reading is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to implementing a bigger system, it's basically just a fast way to enter either just numerical or alphanumeric characters. Some online services can already provide barcode vectors for you, unless you're talking about batch processing. -
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I tried the AI perspective grid in CS5. It wasn't that great to be honest, it was clunky and didn't do much to speed up the process.
And no one seems to know how 4-point or 5-point perspective works, AI only has rectilinear grids.
Pretty much every perspective that involves foreshortening can fairly easily be done using any vector graphics program since "rulers" and "compass" functions are the most basic tools you have in vector editors.
The ability to pick vanishing points outside the artboard that the pen might snap to might be useful though.
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There's a few more things I really wish I could do in Affinity Designer.
One is being able to export all individual curves as they are on the artboard. In the export persona it's possible to export all individual curves as "slices", but exporting them to SVG results in the SVG viewbox being the same size as the curve. I'd like the viewbox to be the same size as the artboard and the curve to be in its correct position on the artboard.
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The other is the ability to snap control nodes (the nodes that control the curvature of the shape) to the grid, it's nice to be able to place nodes precisely on the grid without too much effort, it's a little annoying that I can't do the same for the control nodes.
Then there's the ability to right click on an object and move it by plotting in numbers. I'd really like to be able to just right click and say "move this 10 points/mm/pixels to the left" or "move this 10 points/mm by 30 degrees" (in which case, moving it by 0 degrees would imply moving it to the left, and moving it at 90 degrees would move it upward).
Another little thing I'd like to be able to do is have the transform panel show the "inverse" X and Y coordinates, by that I mean the X and Y position with origin from the bottom right instead of just top left, I can calculate this by hand by subtracting the coordinates from the height or width of the artboard, but it would be nice to be able to plot this directly.
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I fear you will, sooner or later, run into another issue when using Affinity Designer for creating glyphs. At the moment, you cannot snap off-curve control nodes to the grid in Affinity Designer, so these nodes will be grid-aligned (“quantized”) by your font creation application either on import or at least as soon as your font is exported. This will inevitably distort your glyph contours (or at least the ones that are controlled by off-curve points) to a smaller or greater degree … :(
I know, I've been annoyed by the inability to snap control nodes to the grid for some time, not just for glyphs though, for anything really.
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Could you perhaps work around that by applying a thin stroke around the edge of the 1024 x 1024 (or 1000 x 1000) square, so that each glyph is like a Scrabble tile, and then remove the border in FontForge? :unsure:
I thought of that as well, this requires me to group the curve with a rectangle the size of the artboard and remove that rectangle for each individual glyph in FontForge. The reason why I'm using Affinity Designer is to avoid as much vector graphics editing in FontForge because their editor is pretty bad.
I've looked at Inkscape, but I try and avoid that one too.
Maybe I should try and suggest this as a feature request, exporting individual curves as they are placed in the artboard should be useful for a lot of applications as well, such as web or gui-design.
I found one possible solution though. Since SVG is text I found that the two SVG files differ in that the "viewbox" is different, maybe I should write a simple program to iterate through the files in that directory and change the viewbox of every file. Changing the viewbox aligns the curve to the left of the document, but FontForge has a nice "Center in Width" function that can be applied to multiple glyphs at a time.
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The thing is, exporting slices with the export persona exports the curves, but without the necessary whitespace around it, screwing it up with the baseline and size.
Copying and pasting directly imports it as if it's importing a raster image, and doesn't import the actual vector coordinates like it does when I import it from an svg.
FontForge has python scripting so I might find a way to automate that process myself, but Affinity Designer seems to lack macros or "actions" like Photoshop has, so I'd like to find a way to do this using the export persona or something similar.
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I've been messing around with designing fonts in Affinity Designer, then exporting the individual glyphs and importing them into FontForge.
Doing this I've come across some annoying monkey work that I really wish had a more automated solution.
From the Affinity Designer side of the process I find that the most tiresome process is exporting the individual curves.
My process is that I create a folder for each type of characters such as.
- Minuscules (lower case letters)
- Majuscules (upper case letters)
- Digits
- Punctuation
- Ligatures
Then place the curves in a 1024 X 1024 (or 1000 X 1000) artboard, all centered using the "Align -> Center" and place them according to the baseline.
There's a video here showing part of my process:
[media][/media]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bzXDf8rQwg&t=73s
What I would like to be able to do is export each individual curve as it is placed on the art board as an svg file so the curve named "A" exports as "A.svg" in that folder and "B" as "B.svg" etc...
Is there a faster way to do this?
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I have about five fonts up on my website now if anyone's interested:
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A few years ago I found out about FontForge. I didn't know much about typography, but I heard most courses on graphic design go through the subject at least once so I've for a long time wanted to design at least one font.
Now my experience with FOSS graphics software is that they're feature rich, but they usually have an awful UI.
With Affinity Designer I could focus on the type design and so I'd only have to do the very font specific stuff like spacing and kerning in FontForge.
This is what I've come up with up till know. I'm still trying to figure out how to enter kerning rules in FontForge so combinations like "ij" and "To" look pretty bad.
The fonts can be downloaded here:
http://www.tcarisland.com/fonts/Montebello.ttf
http://www.tcarisland.com/fonts/MontebelloBold.ttf
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I'm still looking for the ability to plot instructions on how to move objects relative to their current position. And a pen/line tool that allows me to plot instructions after a simple mouse click. It would be nice if I could say, "move this curve 3 points at a 30 degree angle", I can do something similar using the transformation tools in the lower corner, but it only seems to support absolute positioning, not relative.
This would be particularly useful for using orthographic projection. And should be easy to implement considering the nature of vector graphics and widget toolkits.
Joining tools is still difficult, and for some reason the resize feature never seems to behave like I expect it to when holding down shift and / or cmd.
I found a way to create proper vector brushes in AD1 and AD2
in Feedback for the Affinity V2 Suite of Products
Posted
A few weeks ago I noticed that Affinity Designer 1 supports CPAL/COLR-fonts on Mac on newer versions of OS X, it still doesn't support SVG color fonts though, and I have to use Pixelmator for that. Since I can't see Serif releasing information about their color font support, I would wager that the support comes automatically from the Cocoa SDK and OS X UI libraries rather than something they've done themselves.
I'm a type designer who works mainly with Glyphs, and about a year ago I upgraded to the full version of Glyphs 2 that supports creating many different types of color fonts. Today I found out that I can use the curved text tool to write text along a curve, if I instead of letters draw repeatable shapes, I can use glyphs to create a "brush-font", and since they're color fonts that means I can create overlapping shapes (by that I mean I can create a white layer instead of just white being the negative space as it used to be with BW-fonts).
Since fonts are normally vector-based, a CPAL/COLR-font will provide a real vector brush that when converted to curves becomes a proper vector outline. The only major downside is that it can only support iterative/repeating brushes as it can't warp the letter to fit the curve or support any form of brush pressure.
I might consider making a brush font and releasing it as part of my font-portfolio, any suggestions for repeating shapes you want released as part of a color font?