Improvements to the FontStructor

We’ve released an updated version of the FontStructor. Clear your browser caches, reload and enjoy. Here’s a quick rundown on the new features:

New “Current Letter” Window

There’s a new window in the interface titled “Current Letter”. This contains an example character for the letter you are currently editing and underneath, the name of this character. The universally-despised, floaty, sticky “Next Letter” and “Previous Letter” buttons are now more sensibly integrated into this new, moveable window.

Rollover examples in the Character Selector bar

Rolling over any character in the Character Selector bar will now give you a larger tooltip containing a larger example character and the character name.

Better and wider range of Fonts used in the Character Selector bar

Many of you have noticed that many characters have not been displayed properly in the Character Selector bar. Slots have either been empty or the “null” glyph, a placeholder has been displayed. This has been especially problematic for non-latin characters.

It’s difficult to solve this problem completely because the FontStructor uses the fonts installed on your system to display these characters, and these fonts vary greatly, but we have made some changes which should improve matters. People using OSX and Windows should notice an improvement immediately. Coverage should improve further if users (on any platform) download and install the public domain fonts DejaVu Sans, and/or the very extensive GNU Unifont.

Expert Info

If you choose “Expert Info” from the “View” submenu under “Advanced” you will see the unicode codepoint values for the relevant character, both in the Current Letter Palette and when rolling-over letters in the Character Selector bar. If we add any further such expert features they will probably also be toggled on and off using this option.

Optimized Saving

Saving should now be noticeably faster, in particular for FontStructions which use many bricks or have many characters.

Feeds and Flickr Group

Just a quick note about ways of contributing to, and keeping abreast of current discussions and changes at FontStruct.

For RSS junkies there is a plethora of different feeds available. (If you don’t know what RSS is, take a look at this BBC page).

We haven’t actually put any extra RSS buttons on the relevant pages, so just use whatever standard mechanism your browser provides to subscribe. In Firefox for example, you’ll always see the orange RSS icon in the location bar when a feed is available. Click on it to subscribe.

So first of all there is a pooled RSS feed for all comments. Subscribe to this feed and you can keep up with what’s being said about all FontStructions. I like the empty entries in this feed — that usually means someone has uploaded some Artwork.

Secondly, there is a feed for every gallery page. Just set up the gallery the way you want and then subscribe. You can subscribe to a general feed like What’s New to see the latest Top Picks, or you can follow a particular category like Script FontStructions, or even track developments for a specific search term like “Western”.

If you’re particularly interested in one FontStruction or the discussion about it, every FontStruction also has it’s very own RSS feed. Just go to the respective FontStruction’s home page and subscribe.

Last but not least there is of course the feed for this blog.

Other than commenting on FontStructions, there are two places where you can participate in discussion on FontStruct. Commenting on blog posts like this one is one option, and there is also the FontStruct Flickr group. So far, people have used the Flickr group exclusively for sharing artwork made with, or related to FontStruct, but there’s also a fully fledged Discussion forum.