FontCreator 5.6 • High-Logic
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PDF version of this review

The latest release adds several substantial enhancements to a program that was already very powerful and easy to use, at no extra cost to registered users. If you need a professional tool at a budget price, look no further, FontCreator is the best there is.

The program author’s response to user feedback is amazing. All users can find free help very quickly on the active support forum, even if they have not yet registered the 30-day trial version.

Contents

1. Version 5.6
• Improved Kerning
• Transformations
• New Presets
• Composites
• Other Improvements
2. Version 5.5
3. New Features
4. New Interface
5. New Shortcuts
6. Panose Classification
7. Glyph Transformations
8. Test Font Window
9. Preview Toolbar
10. Align/Distribute Tools
11. Validation Toolbar
12. Open Installed Fonts
13. Online Manual

Version 5.6

Released July, 2007

• Greater Ease of Use
• On start open fonts from last time
• Zoom to fit and centre glyph edit window automatically on resize
• Metrics Options: Caps Height, xHeight, TypoAscender, TypoDescender, WinAscent, WinDescent and Baseline have labels. Line style and colour can be changed from the Metrics Options dialogue.
• MainType added to “Launch Externals” submenu (Shortcut Control F5)
• New Toolbar Icons: Save As, Launch MainType, and Sort Font
• Open Composite Glyph Member in New Window
• Add language automatically adds font subfamily name
• Active Links on the Advanced Naming dialogue (open in your browser)
• New “Force valid Names” option on Postscript Names dialogue
• Font Properties Dialogue shows index of glyphs with highest/lowest XY values
• Sort glyphs in different orders
• Recommended glyphs added to new fonts
• Get Union of Contours now works with composites (not in Home Edition)
• Windows Vista Compatible
• Unicode Updates:
• Unicode Character Database updated to Unicode 5.0
• Auto-naming wizard support for Unicode font names
• Custom Rotation/Skewing of Composite Glyph Members
• Improved Kerning:
• Larger Kerning Window, Show/Hide bearings and Grid
• Drag hand for easy adjustment with the mouse
• Shortcuts for easy adjustment with the keyboard
• Quick find kerning pairs by typing
• Clean up ineffective kerning pairs
• Import/Export Kerning Pairs with values
• Maximum number of kerning pairs in a font increased to 65,535

Available in Professional Edition Only

• Glyph Transformation Improvements:
• Italic — slants glyphs and updates font metrics to match
• Greater precision for Scale, Rotate, and Skew
• Increase/decrease width option added to fixed width
• Comments — add your own comments to scripts
• Preserve side-bearings for Thin, Bold, Hollow, and Scale
• Randomise off/on-curve points
• New Glyph Transformation Presets
• Petite Capitals in Private Use Area (multilingual support)
• Small Capitals in Private Use Area (multilingual support)
• Insert Eastern European, Extended Greek, or Vietnamese character ranges
• Outline — Light, Medium, Bold, and Heavy Outlines
• Old Style Figures, Nut Fractions, and Fixed Width Spaces
• Medieval Unicode Font Initiative Ligatures Collection
• Complete Composites: Many Composite definitions added
• Phonetic Extensions Small Capitals
• Private Use Area Small Capitals with Accents for Latin, Greek and Cyrillic
• Private Use Area Selected Ligatures from the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative
• Private Use Area Nut Fractions (Stacking Fractions)
• Complete Composites: Advanced New Features
• Inherit Side Bearings — used for composing ligatures like ffl or AE.
• Autoposition diacritics — works with most composites
• Relative Alignment — works better for different fonts and styles

Improved Kerning

Most professional fonts have at least a few hundred kerning pairs to improve the spacing of letter pairs like AY. The Professional edition of FontCreator includes an Automatic Kerning Wizard that will generate kerning pairs for you, but you still need to some fine-tuning to get the best results. The Home Edition only supports manual kerning.

Major improvements to the manual kerning dialogue have made it much easier and faster to adjust kerning pairs. Click on the dialogue box for an enlarged image with descriptions of the new features.

• Typing in the kerning pair list goes straight to the first pair starting with the letter typed. Quick find is case-sensitive, and also works in the “New Kerning Pair” dialogue.
• The left and right cursor keys can be used to adjust the current kerning pair. Shift increases the step to 100 funits, while control reduces it to 1 funit.
• The mouse can be used to drag the second glyph of the pair directly.
• A background grid can be shown or hidden, and its colour modified.
• The bearing lines can be hidden to adjust the kerning visually, which is the best way to do it. The Automatic Kerning Wizard can be adjusted to give tighter or looser kerning, but the results won’t be perfect for all pairs. You may get very tight kerning for some pairs, e.g. C- AV To.
• Ineffective Kerning Pairs can be removed by using the Cleanup button. Pairs with a value of zero, or pairs that use a glyph without Microsoft Unicode BMP mappings do not work.
• Import Kerning Values from a text file
• Export Kerning Values to a text file

Glyph Transformations

Glyph transformations are scripts for changing the shape and size of glyphs, and for automating other repetitive tasks. Several new features have been added to make them more powerful and easier to use.

Italic Transform Script

This script skews glyphs using degrees instead of by tangents, making it easier to know what value to use. After skewing the selected glyphs, it updates the font metrics that are required to convert a regular style to an italic style. It enters the italic angle in the Post Tab of the Format, Settings dialogue, recalculates the Caret Run on the General Tab, changes the Font Design and Mac Style to italic on the Metrics Tab, and enters the appropriate data on the Panose Classification Tab to suit the font family kind and italic angle. All you have to do is remember to give it a new name when you save it instead of overwriting your regular type style.

Preserve Side Bearings

Bold, Thin, Hollow, and Scale transformations now have options to preserve side bearings. This makes it much easier to preserve the correct spacing when modifying glyphs. Often, a bold style will need wider glyphs, but the spacing either side of the glyphs will not change much, if at all. Some font designs aim to preserve the copyfit of text, whether or not bold or italic attributes are applied. For these designs, the new options for the width transform are useful.

Width

New options allow the user to increase or decrease the width by a fixed amount, as well as setting a fixed width. To make a glyph bolder or lighter without changing its width use the Width transform, Increase with a value of zero.

Comments

All presets have comments to advise the user how to use the script, and what the intended purpose is. All presets can be edited or saved as new scripts. The comment feature makes it much easier to keep track of changes. You can edit existing comments or add your own. Scripts can have several comments to explain different functions of the script.

Greater Accuracy

The scale transform now allows scaling to an accuracy of two decimal places (e.g. 97.25%). Rotate and skew transforms allow four decimal places.

New Presets

Several new presets have been added that take advantage of the new transform features. The italic preset changes the slant of the glyphs and the font style, while the oblique preset just changes the slant of the glyphs.

Small Capitals and Petite Capitals presets insert small capitals in the Private Use Area, making use of new definitions in the CompositeData.xml file. They scale the uppercase glyphs of the font by about 80% and 60% respectively, then make them bolder. They add a full range of accented Small Capital composites covering most European Languages. Small Capitals and Petite Capitals scripts are also defined for Greek and Cyrillic.

Petite Capitals are designed to match the x-height of a font, while Small Capitals are somewhat larger, and better suited to subtitles. Petite Capitals are proportionally wider than Small Capitals. For Bodoni, on the right, which has a smaller x-height than Times New Roman, I reduced the scale factor to about 60% and also reduce the bold effect to match the lowercase stems. Since Petite Capitals are designed to be mixed with lowercase, they should have the same weight as the lowercase.

Old Style Figures are designed to use with body text. The tops of 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7 and 9 align with the x-height, while 6 and 8 sit on the baseline as usual.

Nut Fractions or stacking fractions use smaller numerals stacked vertically with a horizontal separator instead of with a diagonal fraction slash.

Outline scripts are defined for four stroke weights — light, medium, bold, and heavy. Each script attempts to preserve the original glyph size and side bearings. Results for different fonts will vary.

East European and Vietnamese scripts insert all of the accents and accented characters needed for these languages.

Ligature Collection inserts the ff, fi, fl, ffi, ffl and st, Alphabetic Presentation forms, plus a selection from the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative, a proposal to the Unicode Consortium. Improvements to Complete Composites set the side-bearings to match the left and right glyphs in the ligature group.

Complete Composites

Major improvements to the way that “Complete Composites” works means that much less work is required by the user after completing composites.

Inherit Side Bearings: Two new features, InheritLSB and InheritRSB means that ligatures like AE or ffi, and other composites like Ύ (Greek capital Upsilon with tonos) now have the correct advance width, or at least the correct left and right side bearings.

Auto Align: Complete Composite definitions can now align accents horizontally and vertically on the base glyph. Accents like circumflex or macron are centre aligned on the vowel, while grave and acute accents are offset 1/6th of their width to the left and right of the vowel’s centre line. Vertical alignment is based on the Caps Height of the font, which is calculated from the “H” glyph or the value on the Ranges Tab of the Settings dialogue. For italic fonts, the italic angle (caret run/rise) is used to adjust the offsets.

Other Improvements

Small improvements often make a big difference. Font editing is often very repetitive — not only are many glyphs similar, and therefore require similar changes if you modify one glyph, but fonts often have at least four type styles with the same glyphs, so saving one click or one keystroke can save a lot of time.

Resume Option

Loads all of the fonts that you were working on the last time you used FontCreator. Tools, Options, General, “On start load fonts from last time.” This saves more time than you might think because you’re so accustomed to doing this in most programs that you don’t notice.

Tip: Get into the habit of saving your workplace as you edit a font with Control + Shift + zero. When you resume work later, Control + zero will get you back to where you left off.

New Metrics Options

Show/hide any of Left/right side bearings, Y-Axis, ­WinAscent, TypoAscender, CapHeight, x-Height, Baseline, TypoDescender, and WinDescent. Change the line style or colour. Horizontal bearings lines are labelled. They are calculated from the font metrics and, unlike guidelines, cannot be moved by dragging. They can be moved by recalculating the font metrics or manually changing the metrics on the Format, Settings dialogue. If the Contents and Layout on the Ranges Tab of the Settings dialogue is set to version 0 or 1, the CapHeight and x-Height are automatically recalculated on resizing the capital “H” and the lowercase “x” respectively.

Get Union of Composites

If one or more intersecting composite glyph members are selected, “Get Union of Contours” will now decompose the composite and join the contours. Glyphs like Ç or Ŧ with intersecting co-ordinates are best if made simple. Align the accents and join.

Automatic Zoom to Fit

Resizing the Glyph Edit Window, maximize and restore, tile vertically or horizontally, cascade, will now automatically zoom the glyphs to fit the window.

Font Properties Dialogue

This now shows the glyph index of the glyphs with the highest/lowest X/Y values. This helps you quickly find the glyphs that determine the WinAscent and WinDescent of the font. These metrics determine line spacing in applications.

Open Composite Glyph Member in New Window

When adjusting accents, seeing both the composite and its accents side by side in tiled windows is very helpful.

Active Links on the Advanced Naming dialogue

Buttons next to the links on the Advanced Naming dialogue open the links in your default browser. Check that the links are correct and that the information on the links is correct before publishing your font.

Custom Rotation

Very few fonts use custom rotation of composite glyph members, but FontCreator now supports this feature. If you need to rotate a glyph member by 45º just select the check box. Other angles are possible for mathematicians. To skew a composite glyph member, set the X and Y scales to 1, set the X and Y transforms to zero, then increase the Y transform to skew the glyph horizontally.

Sort Glyphs by Different Orders

The Sort Font feature now offers a choice of four different sort orders:

• Microsoft Unicode or Symbol code points
• Standard Macintosh ordering
• PostScript names
• Glyph type (empty, simple, composite)

The Macintosh ordering is used by many existing fonts, but it is not the most convenient for editing fonts. The sort operation is not undoable, but the font can always be sorted again later to return it to the standard Macintosh order.

Recommended Glyphs Added to New Fonts

On starting a new font, the user can opt to add outlines from a default template font. This will add all of the recommended glyphs apart from the basic A-z characters.

One of the most frequently asked questions on the support forum is, “Why do my quotation marks show as rectangles in Word?” This is because autocorrect in most word-processors replaces straight quotes with smart quotes, and some users who are new to font editing don’t realise that they need to add the smart quote glyphs to their fonts.

Now, they don’t have to as FontCreator will do it (along with many other glyph outlines). Obviously, these glyphs won’t match all fonts, but at least new users will be able to get up and running more easily. Later, they will learn how to modify these glyphs to suit their font, and how to add new ones.

New fonts no longer user the WGL4 character set. The Windows Glyph List 4, developed by Microsoft contains a wide range of European characters, arrows, and symbols, which is probably far more than most new users will want to add. The reduced character set is less intimidating for new users.

Experienced users can add the characters that they need from the Insert Characters dialogue, or by running one of the Transform scripts. To include the WGL4 character set, just run the WGL4 Character Set transform script, which will add any missing characters to the current font (though it won’t remove any extra characters).

Version 5.5

Released May 30, 2006

PDF version of this review

Font Creator continues to improve with this new release. Not just a bug-fix release, but some useful enhancements too.

• Fixed a bug that left the focus in the Overview on opening a Glyph Edit Window
• Added fix duplicate knots icon to Validation Toolbar. A duplicate knot occurs when an on-curve node and off-curve node coincide.
• Added fix duplicate knots feature to the Font Validation Wizard. This automatically fixes all such errors in the font. Previously, the wizard detected the errors, but did not fix them.
• CompositeData.xml Update: Improved definitions for some composites, with new accents and dotless j. New definitions for OldStyle Figures and Small Caps.
• New Transforms: OldStyle Figures and Small Caps Transforms make it easier to add these expert features to a font.

New Features

• New interface with redesigned icons and more toolbars
• Additional shortcuts for the most frequently used commands
• Additional commands on the right-click context menu
• Bookmark shortcuts extended to the Glyph Edit window

• Improved Panose Classification
• New Glyph Transformations for inserting characters and completing composites
• Font Preview added to open installed fonts dialogue
• Improved Font Test Window

• New Align and Distribute toolbar for quick alignment of contours
• Validation Toolbar incorporated into Validation Report
• New Rectangle and Ellipse drawing tools
• Added line wrapping to Preview Toolbar

• Fixed left and right side bearing issues
• Improved glyph validation
• Unicode Character Database updated to Unicode 4.1
• Composites data updated for automatic completion of more composites

New Interface

I hope that you don’t have to use FontCreator on a 640 x 480 resolution monitor, but if you do, there are now many more creative ways of arranging the interface to maximise available workspace. On a wide-screen monitor, the toolbars can be arranged outside of the FontCreator Window to make better use of the extra width.

The icons have been updated, some new icons have been added, and the toolbars can now dock at all four sides of the window. The toolbars have extenders so that icons that do not fit in the available space will pop up on clicking the extender. Mouse-over the toolbars on the above illustration to see what the new icons do.

With the help of the new shortcuts for toggling toolbars, you can maximise workspace while still having rapid access to all of the available tools.

New Shortcuts

• F3 = Find Next when searching text of Postscript Names with Find (Control F)
• F4 = Show/Hide Statusbar

• F6 = Show/Hide Transform Toolbar
• F7 = Show/Hide Glyph Validation Report with Validation Toolbar
• F8 = Show/Hide Preview Toolbar
• F9 = Show/Hide Background Image Toolbar

• F11 = Show/Hide Comparison Toolbar
• F12 = Show/Hide Samples Toolbar

• Ctrl F11 = Launch Windows Font Folder
• Ctrl F12 = Launch Windows Character Map

• Left/Right Up/Down Cursor keys = Pan Glyph Edit Window
• Spacebar = select Hand Tool to Pan in the Glyph Edit Window
• Control Shift 0-9 = Set Bookmarks in Glyph Edit Window
• Control 0-9 = Go to Bookmarks in Glyph Edit Window

• / = Fit to window
• Enter (while inserting contour) = Apply
• Backspace (while inserting contour) = Back

Panose Classification

Change the field for Family Kind and the entire dialogue updates to show appropriate values for the other fields.

The “Value” field shows the Panose number of the font. By copying this number you can quickly fill in the fields for four different typestyles of the same font. Only the weight and letterform fields usually need to be changed.

If you’re unsure what the Panose classification should be you can copy the Panose number from a similar font.

The esoteric art of Panose classification just got a little less mysterious. See Dave Crosby’s excellent tutorial for an introduction to Panose.

Glyph Transformations

New options have been added to insert characters, complete composites and to decompose them.

Transformations can be loaded from the open button. Modify them to suit yourself and save them, or create some of your own.

Illustrated is the transformation for superscripts which will insert, compose, decompose, scale, embolden, move, set the width and adjust the bearings.

The superscript transformation starts by completing composites from your font’s existing digits (0-9). You need to adjust the width value to suit the font that you are working on. Theoretically, it should be 65% of the figure width, plus 52 funits. Heavier or lighter fonts may also need some adjustments to the values for bold and move. The scale around the top left corner of the glyph and movement after emboldening should ensure that the tops of superscripts align with the tops of numerals (7¹7) as recommended by Microsoft Typography.

Further transformations are predefined for subscripts, a full range of italic angles, Small Capitals, bold, condensed, and outline. You can save your own transformations or modify the existing ones to suit your own particular needs and preferences.

Test Font Window

The Test Font Window offers a choice of predefined character sets to display a sample of the current font. Text now wraps to the Window.

The size and position of strikeout and underlining can be tested with the Underline and Strikeout buttons. Strikeout weight and position are defined in Format, Settings, General, and the underline weight and position are defined in Format, Settings, Post.

Preview Toolbar

Text now wraps to multiple lines in the preview toolbar, and there is a drop list of text samples. With a new shortcut (F8) to toggle the toolbar on and off this toolbar becomes much more useful.

Align/Distribute Tools

The new align and distribute tools save a lot of time when adjusting diacritics, The majority of accents need to be aligned horizontally with the centre of the base glyph.

The toolbar can be detached for greater convenience and easy of use, then quickly docked at the edge of the window when not needed by double-clicking on the title.

The tools work with both simple and composite glyphs. With simple glyphs, nodes can be aligned or evenly distributed to ensure that straight lines are truly horizontal or vertical.

For designing glyphs like maths symbols (÷≡) or miscellaneous symbols, the other align and distribute tools are very helpful to make the glyphs symmetrical.

Validation Toolbar

The validation toolbar has been moved to the validation report window. When you check a glyph for errors is the only time you need this toolbar, so having the tools only here saves space on the interface.

If you double-click on an error in the report list, the node or contour that caused the error will be focused ready for fixing with the toolbar buttons: change contour direction, remove redundant nodes, remove duplicate contours, add on-curve extremes, etc.

If real-time glyph validation is off,  the Refresh button will confirm that there are no further problems after fixing the problems.

Some tests, like that for incorrect contour direction, cannot be run due to other errors such as intersecting contours. After fixing the first errors, Refresh will run all tests again to uncover such errors.

The validation report window can be toggled with the F7 shortcut, by clicking the “Show Glyph Validation Report” on the Glyph Toolbar, or from the View, Toolbars Submenu, Validation.

This option is not available in the Home Edition of FontCreator.

Open Installed Fonts

When opening installed fonts you can now see a preview of the selected font. Hold down the control key and click to select more than one font to open.

This option is not currently available with uninstalled fonts.

To edit installed fonts, use the save as option to save the TTF file somewhere else other than in the Windows Font folder. After editing it, run the font Autonaming Wizard to give it a new name before installing it.

To preview uninstalled fonts before opening, right-click and select “Open” from the context menu to preview the font in FontView. This is a function of Windows Explorer, which is also available from Font Creator’s File Open dialogue.

If you have MainType font manager, you can use that to preview uninstalled fonts, and open fonts for editing in FontCreator directly from MainType.

Online Manual

If you think font editing is easy, you have a lot to learn. Though it is not too hard to create your first font, getting it to look properly spaced, and adding all of the extra characters and fields to bring it up to a professional standard takes a bit more effort. Fortunately, FontCreator 5.5 has an updated online manual, that is easy to navigate via the Table of Contents and hyperlinks. It has a searchable index, which you can search for key words. It suddenly got a whole lot easier to find out what you need to know about Font Editing, and a few things you thought you didn’t need to know.

If you prefer to read at your leisure off-line, FontCreator ships with a PDF version of the manual, which you can print out to read away from your computer.

If you need further help, the High-Logic Forum is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Read the FAQ, read the Tutorials created by experienced users, or search the forums for threads that might answer your questions.

If you’re still stuck, post a question in the support forum and someone will try to help solve your problem.