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- CREATE A GLYPH IN ILLUSTRATOR HOW TO
- CREATE A GLYPH IN ILLUSTRATOR FULL
This will remove superfluous nodes and doubled coordinates. This will fix your counters and the path order inside a glyph.
Choose Paths > Correct Path Direction (Cmd-Shift-R).
If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry, do it anyway.
This will insert nodes at extreme positions of path segments.
In the Font tab, select all glyphs (Cmd-A). Cleaning UpĪs I mentioned in the beginning, there is much more to say about good paths, but here is a quick and easy way to correct the worst problems: Or, you can set them all at once by selecting your glyphs in the Font tab and then entering the metrics values in the info area in the bottom left of the window. In 99.9 percent of the cases, you want to Correct Bounds:Īnd what about the width of the glyph? After pasting, you can quickly fix right sidebearing by entering its value in the grey info box. Glyphs will recognize coordinates that are way off and ask you if you really want that object placed out of the glyph bounds. Illustrator uses one coordinate system for the whole canvas, whereas the coordinates in a font work on a per-glyph basis. Make sure you copy only closed paths and make sure you have the right glyph activated when you paste. Now, all you need to do is copy and paste your vector drawings from Illustrator into Glyphs. You can do that by right-clicking the rulers at the edges of the window or by changing your settings in Illustrator’s application preferences. For that purpose, you may want to set your measurement units to points. This keeps rounding errors at later stages to a minimum, especially if your Grid Spacing (see above) is not zero. It’s a good idea to already scale your drawings in Illustrator. That’s approximately 17.6 centimeters (almost 7 inches), just for the x-height! And 500 units translate to 500 points in Illustrator. This means that, by default, your Illustrator drawings are most likely much too small. CREATE A GLYPH IN ILLUSTRATOR FULL
A full em is whatever you set your font size to later on. Or more precisely, whatever you have set your UPM (units per em) value to in the Font Info (Cmd-I). By default, one unit is a thousandth of an em. One point in Illustrator corresponds to one unit in Glyphs. Otherwise, you usually want to keep it at one. So, if you plan a lot of transformations after import, or if your drawings have very, very fine details, then set your Grid Spacing to zero.
If, however, you set your Grid Spacing to zero, Glyphs will use floating point coordinates, and practically no rounding will occur. If your Grid Spacing is not zero, all your coordinates will be rounded by your Grid Spacing value. In File > Font Info > Other Settings, you’ll find a Grid Spacing value. It may be less work than importing the paths and cleaning them up afterwards. So do consider redrawing your design in Glyphs. I covered the details of this in a tutorial. And the tools in Glyphs do help you achieve a higher outline quality, especially when it comes to curved segments.
CREATE A GLYPH IN ILLUSTRATOR HOW TO
When people ask me how to get their Illustrator drawings into Glyphs, my first reaction usually is, ‘Don’t!’ Illustrator’s drawing tools may be sufficient for the average illustration, but in fonts, we usually need better curve quality than Illustrator can provide.