Affinity Designer - Font Design and Exporting

[xoneeleven]

Hello All,

 

We use both Affinity Designer and Corel Draw X8.

On occasion, we need to create fonts, and need to export them to TTF or other formats.

 

Is there a workflow in Designer to create/modify and export true type fonts (or other fonts)?

 

Corel Draw contains bugs that they have never bothered to fix in their font "features". 

 

If Affinity has similar font features, this may cause us to drop Corel Draw altogether. 

 

 

Any info on this would be appreciated.

 

Thanks...

 

Mark

[tcarisland]

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