Best way to bring an eps into Fontlab or Fontographer?

[Ryan Maelhorn]

This topic was imported from the Typophile platform

I am just still so much more at home with my illustration program than I am with Fontlab or Fontographer. I pretty much design the whole set of glyphs in Coreldraw (shocking, I know) and then bring it into Fontographer. However, there seems to be no easy way to do this in bulk. That is to say I have to export every single glyph as a separate eps file and then import them one at a time. Tremendously time consuming, and not to mention that Fontographer seems to auto-adjust the size of the glyphs to whatever it thinks is right, ruining things like x-height and etc. There must be some easier way to do this in this day and age?

[oldnick]

I've been using CorelDraw since version 1, so I'm not shocked in the least.

From long (that is, fifteen years' experience), I would recommend using Fontographer for EPS import, since it imports EPS at 100% of size all the time, whereas FontLab imports at 100% or 99% or 98%, depending on the EPS file. To speed up the export/import operation, I generally export five to eight characters at a time. In the A slot, I import A B C D E, then I cut B C D E, move onto the next slot, paste, cut, etc.

In order to ensure that all glyphs import at the same size relative to each other, you need to place reference marks above and below the exported groups. IN CorelDraw, select each string of characters as you have created them and note the overall height of the group. I usually create all uppercase characters on one line, all lowercase on another; exclam through at on another; dagger through questiondown on another; then incidental characters on a fifth. Taking the largest of these measurements, I created a rectangle slightly larger than that measurement, then center it on the group of characters which is the tallest. I then break the rectangle apart, delete the uprights, then add a third horizontal line at my baseline guideline. Combine the three horizontals, copy and snap to the baseline guideline of the other groups. On any given line, copy this object, center it on an export group, delete the baseline reference, then duplicate the altered marker for each subsequent group.

Select the group of letter and the reference marks and Export Selected Only. In Fontographer, every character will then import in precise proportion. Delete the reference marks just after importing, and you're home free.

[Ryan Maelhorn]

Thanks Old Nick. This is basically what I do, except for the idea of importing a reference shape along with the glyphs, which is BRILLIANT! However I still find this very time consuming. I wonder if anything could be done with pages? putting a different glyph on each page in Coreldraw, in some certain preset order, and Fontographer will automatically know where the A is and where the L is, etc... But I'm probably just dreaming. Some sort of built in OCR would be great too. Just import your complete glyph set and Fontographer will use OCR to decide which glyph to put where.

I also know that it's possible to create a font with Coreldraw only, and since Coreldraw has scripting support, there might be some kind of way to automate that, even if only to get a "transitional" font that will simply be used to ease the loading into Fontographer.

also, I have to say Fontographer definitely does NOT keep the glyphs at the same size for me. IDK, maybe there is a preference setting somewhere I need to turn off, though I did look for one.

[Andreas Stötzner]

This kind of stuff belongs to the BUILD section.

[moiz217]

Interesting discussion.

What I would suggest is to export all glyphs individually from CorelDRAW (may be thru VBA scripting) then, with the help of FontLab scripting (in Python) import each glyph in its slot. This approach also calls for some consistent naming convention of glyphs.

I have got my hands dirty in VBA scripting.

All scripting gurus in Python are welcome.

[spiral]

Scanfont can also be of great help in converting eps's into a font. Despite its name it's not just for scanned material.

[J.Montalbano]

This should be in Build.

ScanFont is the way go. Set up your glyphs in A–Z sequence and ScanFont will put them in their proper places in Fontlab. In the blink of an eye.
The $99 you spend on it will be paid back in the first hour you work with it.

Using any other technique is truly a "waste of time".

[oldnick]

Ryan,

All i can say that the process I described has been working for me for about fifteen years now. It generally takes me twenty minutes or less to import all my glyphs into Fontographer, which also includes setting “working” sidebearings. After checking off “Selected only” in the CorelDraw Export dialogue the first time, the process goes: select items, select Export, hit Enter twice, ALT+TAB, ALT+F+M+E in Fontographer, select EPS file and done. It takes less time to perform these actions that it does to read them.

[Ryan Maelhorn]

ScanFont sounds great. Can it do both upper and lowercase? Numbers? Punctuation?

[Stephen Rapp]

Scan Font sounds like a good investment. I don't usually work with Illustrator files for fonts, but I was sent one recently to digitize and it was tedious work importing characters. I'm getting them in at what appears to be the correct size, though they don't necessarily land on the baseline.

[Thomas Phinney]

What JM said. ScanFont is your friend if you need to do this kind of thing more than once in your life.

[Mark Simonson]

ScanFont will try to figure out what's a character in your Illustrator file, partly by OCR, partly by surrounding white space. You can manually override its "decisions" if you need to. I don't know if there are any limits to the number of characters you can have. It doesn't always guess right what letter (or number) is what, but it's easy enough to rearrange things once it's in FontLab.

By the way, if you are using Mac OS 10.7 (Lion), it won't run. You'll need to run the Windows version in Wine or a virtual machine. (More info here: http://www.fontlab.com/front-page/welcome/mac-os-x-10-7-lion-compatibility/ )