My FontSelf -> FontForge workflow

#1

I love FontSelf because as a graphic designer I’m very fast working in Illustrator, and have tried to design fonts in Illustrator and svg export for FontForge, only to find that I’d have to go back and forth and continually re-export with each small iteration. FontSelf bridged the gap and has brought some new life into my font design work! The auto-kerning is also an amazing feature!

With my current projects, I’m still using some of FontForge’s more robust features like their style transformations and lookup tables. I’ll take a fleshed-out “Regular” style created in FontSelf, run it through FontForge’s bold, condense, or italics transformations, then install it into the system and bring those shapes back into illustrator for finetuning and creating a well-kerned FontSelf new style.

After saving the font in FontSelf, my final step is to bring my FontSelf file back into FontForge to add lookup tables for OpenType substitutions (stylistic alternates, contextual alternates, numerals, etc.).

I feel like my workflow still allows me to do the meat of the work in FontSelf and Illustrator, but is there a plan to add style transformations and opentype lookup table features to FontSelf?

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#2

Hello,
To slant letters, you can use the “slant” function directly in Illustrator.
To make letters bolder, I wrote my own Javascript, see https://www.behance.net/gallery/126682449/Javascript-for-Illustrator-MakeGlyphsBolderjsx
I am currently working on improving this Javascript.

Maybe these two tips will help you.

Best regards, Jens.

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#3

Thank you, Jens, for the link to the Javascript. I tested the bold script and it’s very close to the FontForge transformation. I think the condense/expand features are also necessary because each transformation distorts the character width to a certain degree.