|
Page 1 of 19
This chapter is from CorelDRAW X4: The Official Guide, brought to you courtesy of Corel Corporation and McGraw-Hill Osborne Media, Copyright © 2008.
Chapter 15
Creating Your Own Font
At some point in your work as a designer, you’ll have the need for a special font—something you can’t locate online, something that perfectly complements a drawing—perhaps a typeface that contains a logo that you want to distribute to employees for letterhead stationery.
You can design the characters of your dream font right in CorelDRAW and export your work as a typeface that you and others can use. In this chapter you’ll learn how to set up a page layout specifically for creating fonts, design a simple but interesting typeface, discover some of the secrets to professional font-making, and construct a typeface template you can reuse later. Because a digital typeface’s characters actually are simple drawings, this chapter also makes it easy to make a logo font for business. Naturally, there are some rules are covered in this chapter for building a font that works correctly, and it’s a good idea to review Chapters 10 and 11 if you’re not totally comfortable yet with drawing paths and editing them. The payoff, however, is a new skill, the ability to create a font unlike anything anyone else has seen on the Web, and a tool you’ve created from knowing the tools in CorelDRAW.
Type 1 or True Type?
CorelDRAW X4 can export your font design to Adobe Type 1—one of the oldest file formats for digital typefaces—and to the TTF file format, True Type, a font format shared by Windows and Macintosh users. Which format you choose depends largely on how skilled you are in file management and how much free space you have on your hard drive(s). Type 1, due to its early invention before operating systems were capable of displaying fonts on screen almost exactly as they’d appear you in print, and fonts you see on screen, is not one, but is uses two separate files, : a PFM (PostScript Font Metrics) file and a PFB (PostScript Font Binary) file. CorelDRAW automatically generates the PostScript Font Metrics (PFM) file for you if you choose to export to Type 1 (listed as PFB on the Save File As Type drop-down list in the Export dialog). This file Windows uses this file to display fonts on screen, but the PFB file (PostScript Font Binary) is the one that actually contains the vector information for the font so it can be printed.
As you can imagine, if a PFM file is lost or misplaced, the corresponding PFB file is pretty useless. This is the primary reason why you might want to choose True Type as the file format for your fonts. Similarly, a PFM file without the corresponding PFB lacks the font outline information:, so you’re sunk. One of the advantages to writing your font to True Type is that the outlines when you type with it are exceptionally smooth. This is because True Type uses more nodes in the outline than a similar Type 1 version. And this is also the disadvantage to writing all your fonts to True Type format. The more nodes it takes to describe the outline of a character, the larger the file size is: approximately one 1 byte per node. This seems like a trifling, but it eventually adds up. Some symbol fonts that are more than 200K in True Type format can be written to less than 100K as Type 1’s. Another consideration is how many nodes on a character are required to describe the shape of the character?. Type 1 files require that a character have fewer than 200 nodes; there is no real limit to the number of nodes in a True Type character.
Basic Setup Rules and a Custom Template
By digital typographical convention, characters are set up on a 1,000 by× 1,000 -unit grid. The units don’t actually have a label such as “inches” or “centimeters,” but to get a bearing here, 1,000 points is valid and works for making the characters in a font. The characters you draw won’t fill the entire height of the page, and some can extend beyond below the page below (for descenders in characters such as “q” and “y”) and occasionally to the right of the page for characters such as “W”. Ultimately, you’ll export each character by using CorelDRAW’s Export dialog box for TrueType and/or Type 1 fonts, and in this dialog you can scale your page so characters are exported in their entirety.
The wisest approach to creating a digital font is to set up a custom page size, add guidelines, and then to create new pages for the document as you design the characters in the typeface. Probably, the hardest part of designing anything is finding a place to start. Begin by creating a custom page and adding guidelines, as shown in this tutorial.
|
