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Filed under: Motion Graphics •Production •

The Almost Perfect Font

Using TypeTool

Remember that if you’re not designing a font from scratch, you only have to know enough to be dangerous! Speaking of danger, know that you can’t accidentally damage the original font - it is imported into a TypeTool project file for editing. That said, we suggest you make a new folder and copy a duplicate of the original font into it for reference; this folder will also hold the TypeTool project and the new font(s) you’ll generate.

The font table window in TypeTool 2 showing the original P22 Cage Extras font; we later moved the musical notation marks in line 7 to the number slots in line 4 for use by the Numbers effect. (Click on the image to see it full size.)

Open the font you’d like to customize in TypeTool (File > Open); if it’s a Postscript Type 1 font, open the printer font (not the screen font). Unless you speak fluent Unicode, set the Mode popup at the bottom of the main font table window to Names (seen at left). Select File > Save As and save the TypeTool project as “FontName.vfb” inside your new folder (the name of the project has no impact on how the new font will appear in your font menu). Now you’re ready to get to work.

Characters in TypeTool are referred to as “glyphs.” Double-click any character to open it in its own Glyph window (shown below). The Edit (arrow) tool can be used to move individual points; other tools are available for scaling, rotating, and so on. Note that if you delete a point, the segments before and after automatically join up (they don’t leave a gap). Get in the habit of saving your project file after you’ve edited each glyph.

The Glyph and Metrics windows in TypeTool 2; the width is being adjusted numerically to 500 units in the latter. (Click on the image to see it full size.)

To copy the entire glyph, Select All and Copy. To move glyphs, copy and paste them between Glyph windows or from the font table window; use the arrow keys on your keyboard to nudge a selected glyph into position in the Glyph window. To import glyphs from a different font, open a second font and copy from one to the other.

After editing or pasting glyphs of different sizes, you may need to change the character width (the space the character will take up when placed side by side with other characters). To do this, move your cursor over the dashed line to the right of the character in the Glyph window, and drag the right margin. As you drag, the new width value will be displayed in the upper left corner. Enlarge the Glyph window to drag in finer increments. To set the width numerically, open Window>New Metrics Window and enter an exact value in the second field (see figure above).

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