So how could we help?

[franz]

Bug reports, feature requests and general feedback you’d like to give us. Thank you in advance for sharing!

[AcidProduct]

First off, Fontself is a really fantastic tool! It’s clever stuff and, in general, works really intuitively.

A couple of suggestions:

• While I appreciate it’s probably not possible to tie Fontself actions into Illustrator’s Undo history, is there any way to implement some kind of ‘step back’ function in the type palette? Perhaps it’s just my inexperience, but it’s kind of frustrating when you drag a bunch of glyphs onto the ‘batch’ area and find that, because they weren’t grouped/compounded correctly, Fontself has scattered their constituent parts across many more individual glyphs than was intended. To be clear, I’m not criticising Fontself’s ability to distinguish incorrectly grouped objects (that bit’s always my fault, and when I do it right, Fontself works right too!) but rather the fact that if/when I screw up, there’s the double-hit of not being able to take it back in one go. Rather, I have to go through and manually delete all the glyphs that went wrong and hope I didn’t miss anything.
• Any way to quickly assign the same artwork to multiple glyphs? When making symbol fonts, I like to assign a custom ‘blank’ symbol to undefined glyphs to make it more obvious there isn’t a character there.
• At the moment, unless you’ve defined a certain glyph it doesn’t show up in the metrics view (lower half of Fontself palette). I always find having the full set displayed in apps like Fontographer to be a useful reminder for which characters you want to include in a font (“Oh yeah, I didn’t draw any square brackets yet!”). Perhaps add a toggle to switch between the current view of defined glyphs and a “complete” glyph grid that shows every available glyph slot?
• You mention in the documentation that Fontself can’t yet open a font not generated by itself. Is it “just” a matter of engineering to overcome that? Or are there licensing/IP issues that might prevent you from adding this?

Thanks again!
Ian

[franz]

Thanks a lot Ian, we’re actually experimenting the same pain points - as users ourselves… and as developers

• Undo: while we may start with a small degree of reversibility (not a full history), there is still much work ahead to be done before we can implement it. But on the longer term, we just need to have it.
• Assign a single glyph to multiple characters: never thought about this, definitely worth it but not sure how many people would need a dedicated solution for that (anyone reading please let us know your use cases).
• Highlight missing glyphs: yes, this is something we should fix soon, as it really helps creating fully featured fonts without thinking about the character range.
• Opening non-Fontself fonts: with other font editors, it’s pretty much the wild west, you can do whatever you want and with great power comes great responsibility. Now there are both technical and strategic reasons about not having it in Fontself yet, as we need to ensure users understand what are the requirements to convert or edit other fonts (whether they are legal or technical). Again, we’ll most certainly bring it at some point but will try to ensure we provide a user-friendly (and font author-friendly) solution too.

We’ve plenty of work ahead, but such feedback really helps us feel what are your own priorities. We have to balance between our users needs, the engineering challenges and add a mix of new ideas where we think we could help you get further, faster and in even more enjoyable ways.

[AcidProduct]

Thanks for your quick response Franz! All that sounds fair enough.

• Assign a single glyph to multiple characters: I understand a function just for this might be a tall order. Would some kind of copy/paste functionality be easier to add, and potentially more useful to more people in a wider range of scenarios too? That way at least I could add a ‘blank’ glyph and then paste the same data into multiple glyphs. Pasting into multiple selections would be even better!

cheers
Ian

[franz]

Copy/paste is definitely something that could be useful in different scenarios. Will note this suggestion - specially in the context of viewing all glyphs, including missing ones.

[Vocal]

I just thought of this, because I’m having trouble with my kerning, but it would be awesome if there was a way to flip words upside while working on it (to double check the kerning).

[Vocal]

I would greatly appreciate it if (during some future update), I could upload a font, exported through Fontself, and resume working on it. That way I don’t have to start from scratch every time I want to update it. Thanks!

[franz]

@Vocal Do you mean editing fonts that have not been made in Fontself? Because you can actually already reopen font made in Fontself… Please let me know if you are facing any specific issue there.

[Vocal]

Oh wow! Never even noticed the open button. Sorry about that, and thanks for the amazing feature!

One other thing I can think of is the ability to edit bezier curves in the application. For example, sometimes I forget to make the O, C, G, U, etc. slightly taller than the other letters like A or L.

Thanks for all of the amazing work you all are doing

[franz]

@Vocal Glad you’re going to save a bit more time now! Regarding curve editing, in the next update you will actually be able to replace an existing glyph from any Illustrator shape (instead of having to delete it first), and we will later see how you can edit curves leveraging AI’s own features…

[Hybi]

Hello, as I think, one of the greatest benefits of fontself is the possibility, to create and edit the shapes with Illustrator. So I would never have missed this feature in fontself.
But, as I wrote earlier, a way to replace updated shapes would be highly appreciated.

Kindly Greetings
Hybi

[Steve]

So I installed your 3.1.1 update for Illustrator, and, first up, it would not open the illustrator file with the font design, with illustrator just hanging. I restarted the computer. Same thing. Restarted again, and the entire file has vanished with the entire font gone.

Revision: It seems that the update knocked out my external disk and the file was no longer available. I will see if this will resolve the issue.

[franz]

@Steve Hope you managed to recover from this issue, and let us know if you found out what might have happened as we didn’t hear about such issue when installing an update.

[StrangerCoug]

Is there an automated way from within Fontself to make accented characters given their component parts (e.g. given characters for A and `, automatically create À if I so chose)? Right now the most convenient way I know of to create characters based on other characters is the specific case of creating dotless versions of i and j (by ungrouping the dot from the characters and importing the rest, adjusting the bottoms to match).

[franz]

Hi, so components are still not supported in Fontself and will take a while to be supported. So for now you need to create a different glyph for each accented character.

[mrmrrr]

Hello!
While i recently using fontself i noticed some “issues”
i can’t zoom glyph in single view for setting guides more accurate
there is no snapping guides to glyph or maybe to grid on background

i noticed that because i working on layering font, every style of which is different and its difficult to arrange styles properly. i found solutions for that but it’s annoying.

Here is idea of my font

width of 2 glyphs above is different and this is difficult because fontself create glyphs with width of that shapes. Ok, than i start thinking if i create some invisible box which will contain my glyphs and when i drop it to fontself then it create glyphs with same width, but it’s not working, fontself don’t recognize shapes without fill and strokes. And then i came to annoying solution, i create tiny-tiny-tiny square which is mark for border of my glyph and its worked.

Maybe it’s only my problems, but it would be more comfortable for me if in single view glyph was some kind of grid with snapping guides to glyph and grid and zoom ofcourse.

Is there any plans to implement something like that?

---

Also i noticed some things.

propertys of glyph hiding

and another one
when i try select not highlighted field it’s suddenly desselect text inside
but when i try select highlighted field it’s ok!

[mrmrrr]

mmmmm…Anybody here?

[franz]

@mrmrrr Hey, so we are aware that the tool is not best geared for multiple fonts that need to overlay perfectly, and while it won’t be done in the short term, we are investigating options that may help in the future.

As for the other glitches, these are more minor issues we will add to the todolist (you can just enlarge the panel to see other properties).

[mdecotes]

Are there any updates on the availability of an undo or step back button in Fontself?

[franz]

@mdecotes No Undo in sight for now as it will need a more complex rearchitecturing of our tool than initially anticipated, so please keep saving copies.