Font test

Intro

This is a quick doc to showcase this font (currently called Lee New Gothic) and document the general steps for producing it, so that my little goldfish brain doesn’t forget.

All the glyphs

Look at all these letters:

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

Does this emoji work?

🙂😉😐😕🙃🤨

Software

I am using Glyphs 3 for creating this font. I am using Flow for sketching glyphs.

Steps

Getting started

Good guides:

  1. Create new font
  2. Set parameters under Font Info: Units per Em, Ascender, Descender, etc

Lower case letters

  1. Make new components to share between glyphs by creating new glyphs with names starting with _
  2. Draw the letters, and right click to add components

Upper case letters

  1. Set custom Exports parameters:
  • Disable Subroutines (on): needed because the capitals are very complicated
  1. Copy sketches into glyph, and set size
  2. Use “Trace Image” plugin to trace the image
  3. Clean up
  4. Delete image

Emojis

  1. Set custom Font parameters:
  • Use Typo Metrics (on)
  1. Set custom Masters parameters:
  • hheaAscender, hheaDescender, hheaLineGap: needed to avoid clipping
  1. Set custom Export parameters:
  • Export sbix Table: needed for emojis to render
  • SBIX to SVG: needed to increase support for color font
  1. Create new glyph called “_emoji_origin”, set width to be the same as the UPM for the font, and put small path in the bottom left corner where the emoji’s bottom left corner will be anchored
  2. Create new glyph with the emoji needed (either generate from glyph list or add directly by using the exact name or unicode)
  3. Add component _emoji_origin to emoji and decompose
  4. Prepare image files for emoji:
  • Original image should be square png with transparent background
  • Create a copies of images with different resolutions. For example set first image as resolution 512, with a height and width that works when you paste image into the glyph. Next image should have half resolution (256) and half height and width
  • Set names of files as all “glyphname resolution.png”, eg “slightlySmilingFace 512.png”
  1. Use script Add sbix Images to Font to batch-import your emoji images
  • This is a mekkablue script that can be added from Plugin Manager -> Scripts
  • If it doesn’t work, you can read error messages by opening the Macro Panel