Need help about making a font

[Gorgoyle]

I got already designed type faces in Illustrator but I need now to implement them in FontLab. What I need is to not screw something on the beginning! Like dimensions of my letters in Illustrator and dimensions of my letters implemented in FontLab like font height, ascender, descender etc. Need help or some good tutorial or guide for professionals not amateurs!!! cause I wanna do my first font well.

My font on which I currently working is non serif and modern looking. I need some spacing/kerning advices too. I need to make "my beauty" right! Help me!

[Ted Harrison (FontLab)]

Unfortunately there's no easy way to learn Fontlab. We have some video tutorials on the website and we are making more of them, but most people start with the user manual or with Leslie Cabarga's great book "Learn Fontlab Fast".

[Meitnik]

Ted,

I think that is not a helpful answer, its a cop out. Over the many years I have been disappointed in the FL manual and the very old videos. At Altsys, we took pride in our manuals and worked hard on tutorials. For what you are pricing the software for there should be much better manuals and lots of tutorials. You should have utube videos uploaded by now. Uploading FAQ tutorials from tech support. You can do much better, prove me wrong. Double dare you ;-)

Andrew

[Der FontMeister (FontLab)]

Gorgoyle,

It's hard to type a complete tutorial into a forum message but let's make a start:

1. If you are drawing the characters in AI then it doesn't matter what the dimensions are. You would just use a normal em square (open Arial to see what's noraml for Truetype or any Adobe Type 1 font to see what's noraml for Type 1). Then just scale your character to the emsquare (set it down on the baseline and the ascenders and descenders should work -if not tweak them.

2. As far as spacing you can only discover it by using auto-space to get close and then experiment in the metrics window by using words like "hamburger fonts" and "lolololo" to test the spacing and tweak in manually.

This should get you started.

Jimmy G.
FL Support

[Alex Petrov (FontLab)]

I got already designed type faces in Illustrator but I need now to implement them in FontLab.

Here is the tutorial by Sigurdur Armannsson: http://font.is/?p=48

[jingle33]

Thanks, I needed it.

[mgudelis]

Alex, thanks for the link, very helpful!

[meowerville]

I agree! That's a great beginner tutorial for someone just starting with their font-ing adventures!

[DennisTForce]

Good tutorial indeed. Most importantly it's not too long. 

[theparker18]

I was wondering if anyone knows what the best manual for FL??

[bezben123]

great tutorial for beginners

[drusila24]

Cool, this will help a lot, thanks for sharing it.. Hope you can post more like this, very informative..

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