Template within FontSelf

#1

Maybe this has been answered and if so I apologise. I would really like it if I could access characters within Fontself, and then add my glyphs. So for example I could click to view all the symbol glyphs, and it would show ghosted glyphs that I haven’t added yet. Can I do this?

At the moment I find it hard to type what glyph I have just created. Either because I forget what it is on the keyboard, or I can’t access it. So I have to copy and paste the typed glyph from the template to the area in FontSelf where I define my new glyph. This is especially true when adding glyphs for language supported fonts.

I sincerely hope that makes sense! I’m not sure I explained that well!

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#2

I would love this feature too! I’m making an Ethiopic font with over 300 characters and I keep having to copy paste them from the web in order to find them, but have no good overview of what I have missed so far.

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#3

My recommendation is:

  1. In FontSelf you will find a template that you can open and expand with the characters you need.

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  2. Make a copy of the template, activate the “Character templates” layer, change the opacity to 100% and use the character set that you create locally in Illustrator with the “install” button. Then you quickly see which signs are still missing.

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I wish you success.

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#4

Thanks, that’s a good tip if you are designing a font that uses the basic latin set. Unfortunately for me, and I don’t know if that’s the case for @plushdesign, but my characters are not in this template. So in order to even make a template like this I would need a good overview of the available glyphs for the series that I am using.

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#5

Thanks for the idea :slightly_smiling_face:

Although the issue for me isn’t seeing what is missing, but having to copy every character in to font self because I can’t type it on my keyboard.

For example, if I want to enter the glyph é, then I can’t type that on my keyboard, so I need to copy the text in to font self, after copying my glyph. It just means lots of copying and pasting. Whereas if I could access the template within FontSelf itself, then I could simply add the é to that pre-defined glyph space…

Not sure if anyone gets what I mean here! Hopefully someone will :slight_smile:

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#6

Hi @plushdesign

Maybe you can explain a bit more what glyphs you are making and what your workflow is?

For example, I am creating an Ethiopic font. So I draw my glyph in Illustrator, then rename the layer (by copy pasting the character from the web). Then when I drag that design in to my FontSelf app it automatically recognises which glyph it is because of the name of the layer I gave it.

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#7

Hi :slight_smile: So I design all my glyphs on the one layer, in a row, in Illustrator. Then I drop and drag in to FontSelf. it works fine for a-z and A-Z as well as 0-9. But where it doesn’t work is alternate letters and symbols. So things like the Yen symbol, or TM symbol, or letters with accents over them. Then, as you said, I have to fine the character from the web (or I use characters from the template) and copy and paste them in to Fontself.

That’s the bit I was hoping to avoid, all the copying and pasting from the template, in to Fontself. Especially for a latin alphabet with language support. I am only creating all the glyphs from the character set template. So having those characters already in Fontself, and then I can just add my Glyph to it, would avoid that copying and pasting.

It is such a tiny thing really!! It was just an idea that would save time :slight_smile:

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#8

Thanks @urs7000 for the suggested workaround on using the template to identify missing glyphs. We won’t be able to support custom filtering soon, but here are a few quick tips to ease the creation of many more glyphs:

  • First, you can already enter many characters in the text box, separated by commas to create custom Batch behaviors. It works with any Unicode character (for any language or any symbol), supports multi-character strings for ligatures, and alternates as well. It also supports custom extensions like .alt2, .liga or .dlig):
    image
  • Second, we made a custom script for Illustrator to quickly rename selected objects with a list of custom characters: FS-AI-RenameObjectByPosition.jsx.zip (1.9 KB) .
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Let us know if any of these will help.

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