Tutorials

The Art of Bold

No Comments » Written on March 25th, 2010 by Alec
Categories: Tutorials, Typography

The Art of Bold

I remember thinking, way back when, that word processing software was amazing in the way it created bold versions of fonts whenever you typed ctrl-b. So naive. Of course, bold fonts are carefully crafted by font designers, not generated by some sub-par WordPerfect algorithm.

But why should bold fonts be generated by designers and not via an algorithm? Let’s take a look at the “H” from Helvetica:

Helvetica H

The glyph on the left is Helvetica. The glyph in the middle is what happens when you take Helvetica’s “H” and apply FontLab’s bold algorithm to it. The glyph on the right is Helvetica Bold. The two bold glyphs have the same stem widths (the vertical bars). But note the difference between the horizontal crossbars: the genuine bold glyph has a thinner crossbar than the algorithmically generated glyph.

I don’t know the secrets behind FontLab’s bold algorithm, but I think I can venture a guess. The algorithm takes the original glyph and uniformly inflates it, both vertically and horizontally. In the case of a very uniform sans serif like Helvetica, this algorithm generates something different but not vastly different from what the designer of Helvetica Bold produced. But look what happens in the case of a classic serif face like Minion:

Minion E

Applying FontLab’s bold algorithm to Minion’s “E” gives us a drastically different glyph from the genuine Minion Bold “E”. The stem of each glyph is the same width, but Minion Bold’s horizontal bars are much thinner than FontLab’s pseudo-bold ones. I haven’t highlighed it on the graphic, but, obviously, the serifs from Minion Bold are also much skinnier than the psuedo-bold serifs.

We can see the same issue with Minion’s “O”:

Minion O

A uniform inflating of the “O” gives us a very different glyph from Minion Bold’s “O” — Minion Bold features glyphs that have thicker vertical parts than horizontal parts, giving a delicate, interesting appearance missing from the pseudo-bold.

This is not at all a critique of FontLab’s bold algorithm, by the way. The algorithm is just a courtesy that generates a starting point from which font designers can tweak their bold faces. In fact, the uniform inflation of glyphs to make a bold face is a tried and true technique for some fonts. Take the case of the lovely Marydale as an instance:

Marydale A

Marydale’s bold “A” is essentially the same as its uniformly inflated pseudo-bold cousin.

Famous Serifs

I did a bit of numerical analysis on five of everybody’s favorite serif fonts, and came up with the following chart detailing how the stem widths and crossbar heights of “H” grow from regular to bold:

Bold Serif Chart

What does this mean? Well, the main thing to take away from this graphic is that these fonts hold true to the principle of boldness examined above: namely, that a bold glyph should be expanded from its regular cousin in a predominately horizontal fashion. The width of the stems in our “H”s grows significantly larger than the height of the crossbars, as we go from a regular font to a bold one.

Do you love this sort of typographical analysis? Get yourself Karen Cheng’s Designing Type, and check out the iLT article on vertical metrics.

Posted in Tutorials, Typography

Video FontLab Tutorials

No Comments » Written on May 13th, 2008 by Alec
Categories: Tutorials

I did three video tutorials on FontLab for iLoveTypography.com. iLT’s Johno has posted them on Vimeo, and I thought I’d link to them here, to spread the love:


Kerning Classes in FontLab from ilovetypography.com on Vimeo.


Automatic Ligatures in FontLab from ilovetypography.com on Vimeo.


Creating Discretionary Ligatures in FontLab from ilovetypography.com on Vimeo.

I’ve got ideas for several more tutorials. Check back soon…

Posted in Tutorials

From Illustrator to FontLab

2 comments Written on April 16th, 2008 by Alec
Categories: Tutorials

Illustrator offers powerful drawing tools and an endless array of brushes that make it easy and fruitful to draw letterforms. But once you’ve done your work in Illustrator, you are going to face the issue of getting your vectors from Illustrator into FontLab. You can just copy and paste your letterforms, but if you’ve ever done this you realize that the scaling from Illustrator to FontLab can be way off. Here’s a way to get precision scaling going from Illustrator to FontLab. (This is essentially an illustrated version of the method outlined in the FontLab manual.)

Setting the Stage

I’m going to assume that you’ve already drawn your letterforms in Illustrator.

The next step is to measure your drawings, along all of the important vertical metric measures: baseline, descender, x-height, caps-height, and ascender. Here’s a visual refresher on those metrics:

Vertical Metrics

Make sure your rulers are showing in Illustrator (ctrl-R), and drag some guides from the top ruler to all of the key heights of your forms:

Setting The Stage

In this illustration, I’m using millimeters as my units, but you can use whatever you’re comfortable with.

A Little Math

Note the position of each of your guides, and write them down, as you’ll be doing some gentle math with them in short order. Here’s the basic idea: FontLab measures its fonts in terms of UPM, or “Units Per eM,” and so we have to find a way to go from whatever units you’re using in Illustrator to UPM. The first step is to measure the “em square” (the height from the descender to the ascender of your typeface) in Illustrator. The em square of this example is 60 millimeters, since the distance from the ascender (at 208) to the descender (at 148) is 60. While we’re at it, let’s measure the rest of the vertical metrics in our Illustrator units:

A Little Math

Now the standard UPM size in FontLab is 1000, so let’s use that in our further calculations:

A Little More Math

A New Illustrator Document

These numbers are going to be the heights of our guides for a new Illustrator document that we will use for copying and pasting glyphs from Illustrator to FontLab. So let’s create a new Illustrator document, in points, with the height of 1000 + the length of your descender. In this case, 1000 + 317 = 1317.

Setting The New Stage

Next, we have to put our guides into place. Make sure your guides are not locked, and drag a vertical guide to somewhere near the value of your descender length. You can select your guide, and then click on the “transform” link to set the exact value.

The First Guide

Once that guide is set, you’ll need to place a horizontal guide at zero. Then you’ll click on the upper left corner where the two rulers intersect, and drag to the intersection of zero and (in this case) 317. This sets your zero point for your rulers.

The New Zero

Now you can place more guides, according to the numbers for ascender, caps-height, and x-height that you calculated earlier.

The Right Numbers

Now you can go back to your Illustrator document in which your new typeface drawings reside. Select your “A” and copy it. Then switch back to your new guideline document and paste the “A” into it.

Pasting in Illustrator

It’s the wrong size, but this is easy to remedy, thanks to our handy guides. Click on the form, hold down the shift key (to make sure you resize the shape proportionately), and resize so that the shape conforms to your guides.

Resizing in Illustrator

Almost there!

Now we need a new FontLab file. Go ahead and create one, and then go to the File menu, select “Font Info,” expand the “Metrics and Dimensions” node, and click on the “Key Dimensions” option. Set the Ascender, Descender, Caps Height, and X-Height values to (in this case) 683, -317, 617, and 300.

A New FontLab File

Now go back to Illustrator, select your newly sized “A”, and copy it. Go back to FontLab, open up your “A” glyph window, and paste.

Pasting into FontLab

Voila! A perfectly sized glyph.

Posted in Tutorials

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