Glyph Creation Help

[designboy]

Hi,

I'm totally net to type tool but finding my way around fairly easily but am totally stuck on two thinks:

1,  I have imported glyph outlines from illustrator which contain compound paths, all paths come through but how do I make one of them the negative space?  For example the "o" has an outside circle and inside circle, so the inside one should be the negative space but all I get is a filled outside circle in my font instead of both paths forming an "o"

2, Second issue, but not that big a problem.  I have imported vector paths from illustrator to start each glyph from but the vector lines are slightly different that in illustrator, just where curves meet lines or lines are at slightly different angles.  is there a way to get a better quality import of the illustrator vectors?  I found if I scale up the geometry in the illustrator file I get better quality imports but still not perfect.

Hopefully these are very simple questions for all you font gurus out there but if you can spare a moment of your time to let me know what I'm not doing or doing wrong it would be very appreciated.

Thanks

Designboy

[Der FontMeister]

Use Contour>Path>Reverse Path and then path direction features to toggle the fill off and on. Try a test case with a circle inside a circle and experiment until you get the idea.

The Adobe Red Book shows what we call the "marching ants" who march across the screen until the come to a path...

...as soon as they find a path they begin to pour black paint out

...they have been told to stop pouring paint when they encounter another path WHICH HAS A DIFFERENT PATH DIRECTION

...they again pour again when they encounter another path with the oppositie path direction

etc. etc.

Jimmy G.
FontLab

[Alex Petrov]

2, Second issue, but not that big a problem. 

Read section B in the " Using Illustrator to draw typefaces" tip.