New Spacing Control and changes in Keyboard Shortcuts

UPDATE: A few users have had problems with this latest upgrade to the FontStructor. The FontStructor doesn’t load properly and it is not possible to edit anything. The solution is to empty your browser cache and then reload the FontStructor page. Thanks to djnippa for pointing out a useful Google help page on how to empty your browser cache. Please get in touch if you have such problems and this solution does not help.

Keyboard shortcuts are now single keystrokes

Before we get to the new stuff, there’s been a change in the way the keyboard shortcuts work in the FontStructor editor. Until now, keyboard shortcuts where mostly in the form Ctrl-Key for Windows users and Shift-Key for Mac users. In some browsers like Internet Explorer they didn’t work at all. It would be nice to have standard keyboard shortcuts like those familiar from desktop software e.g. Ctrl or Cmd-C for copy, but this isn’t possible in many browsers, so we’ve decided to simply drop the extra “modifier” keys (Ctrl, Shift etc.).

Keyboard shortcuts are now single keystrokes e.g. “C” for copy, “V” for paste, “S” for save etc. Most of them haven’t changed, the extra modifier key has just been dropped, and most will continue to work even if you still use the modifier key. A few, like “V” to select the pointer tool have had to change (because of a conflict with “V” for paste). Here’s a full list of the updated keyboard shortcuts.

New Spacing Controls

If you just want to have fun with FontStruct and make a quick font, you can stop reading now. FontStruct is designed to be easy to use, and aims to hide away or simplify many of the things that can make creating a professional font complicated. FontStruct will space the letters you create automatically and add a space character for you.

If however you want more control and the automatic spacing isn’t good enough for your needs then read on.

We’ve added four new features related to control over the space between letters.

Global Spacing Control

First of all, you can now set a single value for the spacing between all letters in your FontStructions. You do this by going to Preview, then selecting “Spacing” from the “Advanced” dropdown menu. This brings up a new palette titled “Spacing”.

Simply drag the slider in this palette to set the spacing for your FontStruction. I think the control is intuitive but for those who want to know exactly what is going on, the numeric value is in grid squares and is added to the width of every letter which by default (see below) is one grid square wider than each drawn letter. A quick way to make all the letters in a font join together, e.g. for a script font,  is to set the spacing to -1. Anyway, drag the slider and see.

Monospacing

Many people want to make monospaced FontStructions – font designs in which every letter has the same width, like Courier and other “Typewriter” fonts for example. You can set a single fixed width (monospacing) for every letter in your font by clicking on the “Mono” radio button in the “Spacing” palette and then adjusting the slider. Again the units are grid units. Sorry it’s taken so long fontcollector!

A Space Character

At last! An editable space character. Sometimes people want to actually draw something in the space character slot but many more will want to adjust the space character’s width. The width of the space character in downloaded FontStructions is determined by a formula which doesn’t always produce good results. Now you can set the width of the space and other letters manually using the final new feature:

Adjustable Letter Width

By default, there is an automatic 1-grid square space added to the width of each letter in FontStruct. Now you can set the width of each letter manually. Go to the “Advanced” Menu and choose “Show” and then “Letter Width”. This will make the width of the letter visible as a solid green line. Drag this line to set the width of the letter you are editing. If you want to go back to the default 1-grid square width, click on the little “R” icon to reset the guide and it will start adjusting automatically again. Note that there is a close relationship between the global spacing setting and the adjustable letter width. The global spacing setting value is basically added to the letter width.

There’s a new help page about all these new spacing control features.

Other Changes

Along with these changes, there have been a number of minor optimizations to the FontStructor. The performance of some of the tools and the Preview have been improved.