hubertjocham Posted October 10, 2014 Share Posted October 10, 2014 Hello Affinity, first I want to say, that I am waiting for a Adobe competitor for a long time now. I am very glad you started the Affinity project and I am also looking forward to the publishing tool. This morning I bought a license for the app and I already did some testing. I have to say. I am a professional type designer and I work a lot with curves in Fontlab and Glyphs. The outline tools you get in Illustrator are very poor, I think. Due to those problems I would say, that I can achieve a good outline in the font apps in half the time. Still the font apps could be even better. Maybe I cannot expect you to really implement what I would like to have because you might say it is not important for most of the users. But still I want to share with you. Maybe it is even better to speak on the phone about that. I am working with curves in 2 different ways. With open and with closed outlines. In Glyphes and Fontlab I can easily copy and paste parts of a form. It is also very simple to open and close a form. The reason, why I copy and past a section is to maintain that part when I want to scale it. In other cases it is better to have separate closed forms and work on them separately and remove the overlap later. For typefaces one thing is very important. The so called extrem points. I have uploaded a picture to show you what I mean. A very helpful feature would be a way to create those extremes automatically. Fontlab and Glyphs have that feature. But in Glyhes the extremes are just added and the other wrong points stay there and you have to delete them. Deleting points in Illustrator means that the curve changes drastically. Glyphs and Fontlab try to keep the curve as good as possible. I would love an option that creates extremes and deletes the unnecessary points. Extremes are very important for interpolating and not only in type tools. Oh, Kerning is not supported in Affinity Designer, is it? Is there an Open Type panel? I think that should be fine for now. I would love to discuss that stuff with you. Hubert Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Harris Posted October 10, 2014 Share Posted October 10, 2014 Creating the extreme points sounds like an interesting idea. I agree it could be useful for more than creating glyphs. Affinity does support kerning, although currently only from kern tables - support for OpenType kerning will be in the next update. The OpenType panel is shown by the Format => Character => OpenType menu option. It currently has a few bugs, and we don't currently implement the GPOS table. This will get better in the next update and will improve further over time. Dale 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hubertjocham Posted October 10, 2014 Author Share Posted October 10, 2014 Ah cool. looking forward to the kerning and.. the extremes. Another thing I saw, when I first worked with curves was, that when you alter a curve just by griping it with the cursor, the curve nodes change in angle. I thing it would be good if the angles stay. Anyway, I think you are definitely on a good way and I hope it will work out fine for you and your team. By the way, I know the guy who programmed the Glyphs app and if you like, I can ask him it he can support you in the extrem thing. He is a nice guy and Glyphs is also only made for Mac. Hubert Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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