Introduction What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been
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Introduction What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been Introducing Fontographer How to get the most out of your Fontographer materials Before you begin by David Berlow They say that good things come in small packages. When it comes to Fontographer, this has never been so true. In 1985, I was working at Bitstream designing type on a large proprietary font design system. For those of you who don’t know what this means, I’ll tell you. Large means it wouldn’t fit on a desktop because it was larger than a desk. We had workstations that were about six feet wide by six feet deep by four feet tall, with a 19" vector-monitor, a mouse with four or five buttons, and a keyboard with a few dozen extra keys. If you must know, this was trucktop publishing. Proprietary means that we developed the software and some of the hardware ourselves so no one else could use it, and there were only two or three engineers in the world who knew how to make changes, additions or fixes to the software and this happened quite infrequently and very slowly. In addition, proofing the fonts required a series of conversions, and mastery of a typesetting command language about as friendly as Kanji. Into this world, one day, came two visitors from somewhere down south. They carried a little box that, because it was so small, I thought was surely a kitchen appliance, a toaster or blender perhaps. But when they plugged it in there seemed to be type drawing going on inside of the little box. There were about ten Bitstream type designers in the room and we all gasped. I climbed upon the table to get a closer look and sure enough, there was a letter on that tiny screen. But there were not enough points on the character and not enough buttons on the mouse and the screen was smaller than my face—how could this possibly work? Well, within two months I had a Mac Plus and Microsoft Word, so I could “correspond with our clients.” I also purchased my first copy of Fontographer from Altsys. I played around and drew a few characters. It took a while to get the hang of the Bézier tools. At first I thought I had a tiger by the tail. But for me, used to the real estate of the big screen, and the point structures of Bitstream outline fonts, this “toaster” font design system was like painting a picture through a porthole. A bit later though, the Mac II came out. It didn’t take me long to convince the powers at Bitstream that “corresponding with our clients” would be a lot easier if I had a more powerful machine and a bigger screen and a LaserWriter and a 300 dpi scanner. (I can’t remember how I got the scanner, I think it had something to do with OCR.) The first upgrade of Fontographer also was bought and now I was able to cook. I started making characters that were much more complex than what we could make on our proprietary system and I was making them in much less time. But still I wasn’t making fonts. I will never forget the first time I actually made a font on Fontographer. Roger Black, the well-known publication designer who worked at Newsweek back then, wanted a font for his redesign of California Magazine. Roger had visited the letterdrawing offices at Linotype where I worked in the 70’s, and he had visited Bitstream as well in the 80’s in several failed attempts to get Linotype and Bitstream to make custom fonts for him and his clients. When he came back to strafe us again in the winter of 1986, we were ready. Matthew Carter, Bitstream’s VP of design, deflected him at me and I told Roger that we had never actually made a font with Fontographer and the Mac, but we would love to try. He sent me the artwork of a long neglected type from an Italian foundry which I scanned, and went to work on digitizing and spacing. I was totally stunned at how quickly it was done and the quality of the results. It was great, and Roger loved it as well. Most especially because it took less than a working week to accomplish. From the time we agreed to do the face to the time it appeared in the magazine was about a month! By 1989, Fontographer was getting better and better. Things like remove overlap, correct path direction, merge point, the ability to generate Type 1 fonts and more, were all making it a pleasure to design fonts for the first time in my life. The Mac was getting more powerful and there were a lot of graphic designers, droves in fact, moving to the Mac. But they were constrained in their graphic design by the limited availability of fonts on the Mac. When Fontographer got hinted generation of Type 1 fonts into the market in 1990, the font world was truly changed. By this time I had left Bitstream to concentrate fully on The Font Bureau, the type design company I have founded with Roger Black. We released our first retail fonts that year. The general impression was that they were as good as any fonts available for the Mac. Needless to say, Altsys had become my best friend. Throughout these years, from 1985 to 1990, the most astonishing thing to me was that Altsys was constantly improving the features, performance and ease-of-use of Fontographer in spite of the fact that there was no competition in the field for Fontographer. When competition and a larger user base developed, Altsys went into overdrive. Through Fontographer 3.0 and 3.5, TrueType and PC font generation, improved printing functionality, Multiple Masters, change weight, and all the rest—Altsys was always doing the right things at the right time for all the right reasons. Today, you have before you the next generation of this great tool. Macromedia Fontographer 4.1 is a truly revolutionary change in the quality and functionality of type design tools. Letter spacing is treated like a database, scaling, rotation, skewing and such are totally interactive functions, and autotrace is amazing! The Font Bureau tested and tempted itself with version 4 as soon as the specification came to us in 1991. Throughout our review and use of version 4, we had the feeling that we had only scratched the surface of what it can do for type designers like us. In the coming year we think we’ll be finding out that we’ve got a tiger by the tail—again! Good luck to all, and thanks to the Fontographer team! Introducing Fontographer Welcome to Fontographer! First of all, thank you for buying our product. Second, thanks for opening this manual. We hope you’re reading it not because you’re having trouble, but because you want to learn more about this exciting program. Our manuals are written by people who actually use (and create) Fontographer and who have graphic arts and typography backgrounds. We’ve tried to be as informative as possible without being stuffy. We hope you’ll find every aspect of this program easy: from our unique approach to learning, to the panoramic interface of the program itself, and finally, to the actual process of creating fonts. We want your experience with Fontographer to be so satisfying and painless that when you’re through, you’ll agree that this is the best font design program in the world! As a matter of fact, Fontographer has been the standard for professional typeface and logo design since its introduction in 1986. Before Fontographer, typed images could only be produced by using complex, expensive, and time-consuming procedures. With the advent of personal computers however, typography became attainable to everyone: from the graphic illustrator to the desktop publisher to the business executive. And now, Fontographer provides this capability to you. So, on with the manual—we hope you enjoy it. Fontographer 4.1 allows you to generate ATM-compatible Type 1 fonts, as well as Type 3 PostScript fonts, TrueType fonts, PICTs and multiple masters on the Macintosh, and Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) files. You can import EPS files directly, and use their outlines in the drawing window. You can also use metrics information from a variety of sources, and export information to those sources, as well. Additionally, you can import kerning tables from Adobe Font Metrics (AFM) and other files. You can also take advantage of the PostScript graphics you create in Macromedia FreeHand and Adobe Illustrator by pasting them directly into your characters. Many dialogs in the program give you two options: Easy and Advanced mode—letting you have total control of the program if you want it, or allowing you to rely on its simple and automatic settings. For advance users who don’t always want to rely on automatic hint settings, we have a menu of hinting controls. And in the Metrics arena, Fontographer lets you space and kern faster and easier than ever. With autospace, autokern, and assisted kerning and metrics you can save yourself from having to kern and space each individual character or font separately. Now you can ask Fontographer to do it automatically, or you can use the same kerning and spacing information from one font, for others that kern and space similarly. So whether you are a novice or an experienced graphic designer, Fontographer allows you to assign your characters and graphic images to any key or combination of keys, and gives you the added ability to instantly repeat and resize these images in any application.