Generating glyphs automatically

This one is pretty basic, but some of you will find it helpful.

As I've mentioned elsewhere (can't remember where), I learned a lot writing the 1st edition of Practical Font Design. One of the biggest things was really very simple.

I tend to start my fonts now with modified versions of fonts I've already designed. I have well over a hundred to work from now. Over the years I've learned many things that really help lessen the huge amount of hours spent designing fonts.

When I first started, I commonly spent 400 to 500 hours for each style of a font family. Now I spend less than 50 hours for the first style and closer to 20 hours for derivative styles like light, bold and so on—with far better quality.

Some of the saving techniques are obvious.

• Make all of your composite characters with components: like éåøöñ and so on—the accented characters needed for languages other than English that make up close to half of the standard 256 characters in the legacy formats like truetype and type 1. Components work like symbols in Illustrator. You actually import a link to the original. If you edit the original, the components are automatically updated.

However, building composites by importing components is not as simple as it appears. There are several issues:

1. You need to bring in the letter component first as this sets the widths and sidebearings.
2. Adding a component to a glyph window that already contains a path dies not adjust the width or sidebearings.
3. Adding the accents by hand forces you to hand align every composite.

Here's the current procedure

1. Pick the font with which I am going to start. Often this is simply making a bold, light, condensed, or black version.
2. Save as under the new name
3. Delete all the composite characters
4. Design the caps, lowercase, and figures
5. Open metrics and set the width and sidebearing for these characters in #4. Editing the components will not fix bad metrics in the composites.
6. Design all the accents and the dotlessi
7. Use generate glyphs to add all the composite characters. There is a list of these on the Website in the right sidebar that you simply have to copy/paste into the Generate Glyphs dialog.
8. The resulting composites will need very little work except for ligatures like ae oslash and so on. But the components will be in place for those also. All you have to do is decompose the components and merge the contours.

A new release: a pretty italic companion to Ablati

The unilateral serif has been fun and I use it a lot, but I really needed an italic companion. Being tired of the italics I've been doing, I took my inspiration from the headlines from several of the articles in a 1929 Woman's World magazine. It is a loose, freehand translation of what I saw there. I think it has a really nice look to go with Ablati. As usual it is cheapest on my site. It's $12 for the font and $21 for the 2-font family there.