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Creating a handwritten font with Designer


Mr. Doodlezz

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Happy new year guys! :5_smiley:

I am in the middle of creating my first font (handwritten) and use Affinity Designer for designing the digits.

However, the process is very tenacious right now. Since I'm new to font development, this is my current approach and setup.

  1. I created a document with a growing number of artboards, one artboard for each possible digit, ligature, symbol, and so on.
  2. I created each digit using a stroke with slightly varying line widths at the beginning and end.
  3. The program into which the digits are imported works with PDF, SVG, EPS among other (to me unknown) file formats –
    that's okay, because I can output each digit with the export persona named accordingly. SVG is the recommended file format.

But I do run into some problems:

  1. The exported digit-files MUST NOT be exported as a path with a stroke
  2. The exported digit-files MUST consist of a single shape.
  3. The exported digit-files (even if points 1. and 2. were taken into account) as SVG are created with a white box in the size of the
    artboard around them, which lead to another step of selecting and deleting something manually that actually wasn't created in
    the first place while designing the digit. (The document is set up with the check for Transparent background under the Colour dialogue)

I would have guessed now I can select all contents of the different artboards via shift+click in the layers palette and convert them with a single click on "Expand Stroke" - but this is not possible, because the selection is automatically limited to the artboards and not to the children.

Furthermore, I would have liked to use an action/macro to merge the multiple curves of single letters like A, B, E or F into a single curve - but unfortunately the macro palette only exists in Affinity Photo, if I see it correctly.

Does anyone have an idea how to convert the files without all the unnecessary additional effort/tasks? :35_thinking:

Cheers and have a nice day
MrDoodlezz

2023_b.png.6eb47882072cc58253b7219526339b14.png

 

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Hey, I didn't know the FontForge sub site yet. It's a bit too code-heavy for me, I can't quite comprehend it,
especially from the point of "Workflow". I didn't expect it to suddenly be about programming.

But that's not the point.

I created my document after a video tutorial that follows this template, so it is also 1000 x 1000 pixels in size.
Importing isn't the problem either. I already imported numerous glyphs, but at one point I thought there mus
be a better, more convenient way. (And maybe with less coding involved? :7_sweat_smile:)

As I stated above and shown in the clip it's the way to get there until FontForge's
file requirements are met and converting the line drawings + exporting from Designer is very tedious.

I also tried BirdFont, but quickly returned to FontForge, as many features are missing from BirdFont
or hidden behind cryptic icons.

2023_b.png.6eb47882072cc58253b7219526339b14.png

 

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Yes macros are sadly only available in APh, but also limited in overall functionality there. Also the SVG generation/export is also not that much customizable in AD, even there is a more button for some few settings, you would probably have to fine tune the SVG code itself here for more advanced things. - Some further infos for font creation (but more related for Ai + Inkscape) can be found here "Making your first font with Glyphr Studio", though I can't tell if things would be applicable here for FontForge and AD too in this manner.

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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