Drawing a Centerline, Not an Outline

The only real qualifier for characters you design for a digital font is that the shape must be one single shape, vector in format. This means as part of the font creation routine, you’ll use the Shaping operations a lot to combine several objects into a single one. But that’s about it: typefaces don’t use fancy fills, but rather a digital typeface just has to have outline (path) information for each character.

You can take three different approaches to drawing the characters that make up a typeface:

• If you’re handy with a felt-tip pen and own a scanner, you could bring the bitmap images into CorelDRAW and then use Power TRACE (see Chapter 26) to auto-trace every character. Using this approach, as shown in Figure 15-2, often leads to a natural style, full of little irregularities, for the typeface characters. Routinely, you’ll need to manually edit the result of the tracing to eliminate superfluous nodes and to make other minor consistency corrections. Alternatively, you could bring in your scanned image, lock it on a layer, create a new layer, and then manually trace over the characters you physically drew. This takes more time, but adds consistency as you draw.
  
• Drawing each character by hand. This approach often leads to gross inconsistencies between character stem widths—the strokes that make up a character are called stems—and even to inconsistency with a single character’s parts. This is a time-consuming process, and you can’t reuse the basic structure of each character, as you can by defining centerlines for the stems of each character and then giving the stems different properties.
• Making centerlines for characters, then applying outline properties. This is the way to go for speed, stem consistency, and reusability of your character designs, and it’s the approach shown in this chapter. Here’s the idea: you draw a “skeleton” of a capital A, for example, a tepee shape with a crossbar, so you have two paths, three maximum. You can now apply a wide outline to the paths, even put a round-line cap on the strokes (see Chapter 18). Then at some point, you choose Arrange | Convert Outline To Object on a copy of your paths, and before you know it, you have a character whose stem widths are completely consistent. After you combine the paths, the combined shape qualifies for export as a TrueType character. Better still, you can apply an Artistic Media stroke to your capital A, and then later use the Break Apart command. CorelDRAW saves your original paths, and with a little refining, the Artistic Media object becomes an elegant, intricate character perfect for exporting to a font. In the illustration here you can see three examples: a manually drawn character, a character made by increasing the outline width and then converting it to an object, and a character made with a centerline and with Artistic Media then applied.
  
  

Professional Fonts

It’s beyond the scope of this book to describe how commercial, professional fonts are created, not because CorelDRAW doesn’t have the tools, but because typography is an art unto itself and requires many years of developing the skill and knowledge to produce such contemporary classics as Garamond, commonly credited to Tony Stan in the 1970s. The typeface you’re reading in this book has serifs (the small extensions to the stroke stems on each character), and Roman-style typefaces have thick and thin stems that need to be carefully calculated for character consistency and legibility at small point sizes. Therefore, creating a commercial typeface that you could, for example, sell for $300, is not the point of this chapter. You need both an artist’s skills in CorelDRAW and a typographer’s skills to make the big bucks. However, you can indeed make interesting fonts for personal and in-house use and make symbol fonts. This chapter is intended as a guide to making a basic typeface and to exporting the characters to True Type file format.