If you’re a Mac user and you’re not familiar with using a terminal emulator, pick up a copy of Learning Unix for OS X by Dave Taylor. If you don’t have fonttools already installed, you can get hold of it by issuing the following commands at a command prompt: fonttools was originally written by Just van Rossum, but is now maintained by Cosimo Lupo and a cast of hundreds. To crack open that OTF file and look at the tables inside, we’re going to use a set of Python programs called fonttools. Each of these pieces of information is stored inside a table, which is laid out in a binary (non-human-readable) representation inside your OTF file. The computer is much more concerned with details about how the font is formatted, the glyphs that it supports, the heights, widths and sidebearings of those glyphs, how to lay them out relative to other glyphs, and what clever things in terms of kerns, ligatures and so on need to be applied. In other words, most of the information in a font is not the little black shapes that you look at they’re easy. A simplified schematic representation of a font file would look like this: Some of the information is global, in the sense that it refers to the font as a whole, and some of the information refers to individual glyphs within the font. It’s a related collection of tables - lists of information. What is a font?įrom a computer’s perspective, a font is a database. So put on your overalls, grab your bucket, and let’s take a look inside the font sausage factory. In an ideal world, this would be information that programmers of layout systems and font handling libraries would need, but implementation details that font designers could safely ignore.īut we are not in an ideal world, and as we will see when we start discussing the metrics tables, the implementation details matter for font designers too - different operating systems, browsers and applications will potentially interpret the information contained within a font file in different ways leading to different layout. In this chapter we’re going to look in some depth about the OpenType font format: how it actually converts the outlines, metrics and advanced typographic features of a font into a file that a computer can interpret. You can copy / paste characters from that page and insert into a text control in the app.They say that if you enjoy sausages, you shouldn’t look too carefully into how they are made, and the same is true of OpenType fonts. The Mockups glyph viewer is only viewable on Webkit/Safari 3.1 or greater, Google Chrome 4 or greater, Firefox 3.5 or greater, IE4 or greater, and Opera 10 or greater. We'll continue to improve it with incremental releases.įor people looking for a way to get special characters into the app, I created a Mockups Glyph Viewer showing all the glyphs the Mockups font supports in Mockups 2.1 and later. We're also missing a few unicode characters that I'm going to add. Some characters are rendering poorly below 12pt, our kerning pair metrics are not quite functional in the app, and the baselines are still a little off. We still have a long way to go, and have a good to do list for things that need improvement. In case you missed it, you may want to check out the Font FAQ before you decide to update to 2.1.x. The first version of the Mockups font is now out in 2.1, and I think we have a good start at eliminating the clipping issues we had using Comic Sans on Windows and Chalkboard on the Mac.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |