Improvements to the Font Generator

We’ve made a couple of improvements to the “Font Mortar” which is the software which glues your bricks together and generates the TrueType fonts on FontStruct. These are the first of a number of planned changes to the font generating features.

The first change effects the height of the fonts. A lot of people have noticed that FontStructions often have to be set at crazily large point sizes to be legible. This should no longer be the case with fresh downloads. Also the FontStruct icon which is used as the “empty glyph” in every FontStruction is now scaled properly so it doesn’t dwarf other characters.

The second change deals with word spacing. Early on, FontStructors discovered that if you built letters starting one or two bricks to the left of the “LEFT” line, you could get around the automated one-brick-spacing between letters. Until now this trick only worked on the FontStruct website. Now it works for downloaded FontStructions too. So classics like Marshmallow Script, Ice Box or Epiorque Joined should now work as expected without any need for manual spacing. Support for adjusting word spacing in a more intuitive manner is on its way.

One side effect of these improvements is that most fonts downloaded from now on will have slightly different vertical metrics (heights and linespacing) and possibly different horizontal metrics (word spacing).  So if you have used FontStructions in any existing artwork, you may want to make a copy of your old download before you grab an updated version.

Meet Me at Pecha Kucha Night in Buffalo

The center of the typographic universe will be in Buffalo, NY next week as TypeCon holds its annual proceedings. If you are anywhere nearby Thursday—Saturday you shouldn’t miss this opportunity to see Erik Spiekermann and scores of other interesting speakers and workshops. FontShop is a proud sponsor of the conference and has a few tickets to give away, so go get ’em!

As a TypeCon warmup, I’ll be at the Pecha Kucha Night on Tuesday, July 15 presenting FontStruct. Most of what I say won’t be news to veteran ’structors but you should show up anyway to heckle me while I attempt to explain FontStruct in 6 minutes and 40 seconds.