Vertical Metrics, Improved Touch Support and More

As promised, today we’re introducing a series of new features, enhancements and bug fixes to FontStruct.

Line Height Control (Vertical Metrics)

Until now, FontStruct has automatically calculated the overall line-height and line-spacing for each downloaded font. This is usually fine, but every now and again people request manual control over these values.

Today we’re giving FontStructors this option. To use it, first select “View” and then “Line Height” from the menu (You need to be in Expert Mode):

Two new lines labelled “top” and “bottom” appear on the canvas. You can simply drag these lines to specify a height for the font. The lines snap to 1/8 of a grid square when dragged and dropped and you can click on the little reset button to go back to the default, automatic calculation.

The values which you specify like this will be stored in your downloaded font file. In accordance with the first law of FontStruct – thou shalt not make things unnecessarily complicated – that’s all there is to it!

Please note that a lot of desktop software will still ignore or mangle whatever vertical metrics values are stored in a font file. So you may not always achieve the precise desired effect. For anyone interested, some souls braver than I have researched and documented the history of this mess elsewhere.

Anyway, I think FontStruct’s new feature will suffice to solve many line height problems, and you will find that some desktop software (Glyphs for example) will indeed respect your placement of the new lines.

Improved PhoneStructor (Touch Support in the Editor)

The FontStructor editor and the FontStruct website have been kind of usable on phones and tablets for quite a while now, but in reality, FontStructing on a touch devices has hitherto been cumbersome and impracticable.

With today’s update, we’re adding a series of interface optimisations to significantly improve FontStructing for users of touch devices and small displays, including …

1. Finally, a tap-friendly Menu!

The dropdown menu, which simply didn’t work on touch devices, now does. Note that the “Expert Mode” toggle now appears as part of this menu on small displays.

2. The Toolbar is docked and augmented

To keep it out of the way whilst drawing, the toolbar is now automatically docked to the top of the screen. Some commonly used actions (undo, redo and fullscreen) have also been added for ease of access. Note that the docked toolbar only appears on very small screens (phones in portrait mode), tablets are unaffected.

3. Improved Zoom

Pinch-to-zoom is now possible, making the zoom palette superfluous and so freeing up valuable screen space for drawing.

4. Brick Palette Toggle

The brick palette (My Bricks and All Bricks) can now be toggled with a single tap. This gives you swift access to your bricks while also freeing up more screen space for drawing.

5. Character Selector also works!

Something else which didn’t work properly on touch devices until now was the scroll functionality on the character selector. It does now. We’ve made the arrow buttons and the letter selectors themselves a bit bigger to suit your fingertips, and you can even swipe along the list of characters to scroll through them.

Miscellaneous Fixes and Improvements

In addition to Vertical Metrics controls and improved touch support we’ve also made a number of diverse tweaks to the site and the editor.

1. Spontaneous Brick Swap Fix

This will be familiar to some of you as the worst bug in FontStruct: You save your work, then after reloading it the following day, you find that “gremlins” have swapped out some of your bricks overnight and your design is corrupted.

– This has proved a very difficult bug to reproduce and fix, but we are introducing a change today which hopefully will improve matters. Fingers crossed!

If anyone does experience this problem again in the future, please let us know, especially if you can provide us with detailed steps to reproduce the problem.

2. Cyrillic in the Widget

Recently, more FontStructors have been adding Cyrillic letters to their fonts or making purely Cyrillic designs. We’ve added a Cyrillic preview option to the widget to support this trend. Suggestions for a better Cyrillic sample text are welcome.

3. Links in descriptions

The editor for writing FontStruction descriptions was broken, making it impossible to add proper links in descriptions. That should be fixed now.

4. Comment Removal

You can now remove your own comments for up to one hour after you have made them.

5. Improvements to Glyphs Export

We’ve made a few improvements to the Glyphs Export functionality.

Firstly, we updated the export to work with the latest version of Glyphs.

Secondly we added the FontStruct grid in every export, so you can now continue to reference the same grid in Glyphs.

Thirdly we have made the export behave differently when you are exporting a “pure” pixel font (i.e. one consisting only of pixel bricks and without any filters). When you export a pixel font like this, the exported file will be compatible with the official Glyphs Pixel font plugin, which is actually pretty cool. Now you can move seamlessly from working in FontStruct to working in Glyphs. Thanks to @gingerbreadman and @glyphsapp for encouraging and helping us get this one done.

6. Removal of the “Contribute to Google Fonts” Button.

We love Google Fonts and have benefited greatly from their support in recent years, but we’ve decided to remove this button from the site.

Unfortunately there were technical issues with keeping the functionality working consistently at our end, and overall it did not seem that this form of submission was working very well.

We continue to encourage designers whose work fulfils the Google Font criteria to submit their work for consideration to them, and we will keep the OFL license option (this is the principal requisite license for Google Fonts) as a permanent part of FontStruct.

Future submissions of FontStructions to Google Fonts will have to be made manually and independently of FontStruct.

7. Grid-coordinate Display

This is an experimental one. If you are in “Expert Mode” you will now see the current grid coordinates in the bottom right hand corner of the screen.

8. “Desert rescue” feature

Every now and again someone gets in touch having somehow panned off into the unmapped farther reaches of the grid. They’ve lost all orientation and have no idea where the baseline or origin is.

Clearing the browser cache was the old advice here, but now much more conveniently, you can simply double click or double tap on the “hand” panning tool to return the grid to its default position and find your way home.

That’s It!

Happy FontStructing!

Future Competition Results

Many thanks to all participants for another tremendous Structathon.

I hope everyone had as much enjoyment building their FontStructions as I did in seeing all your diverse and wonderful ideas land in the Gallery over the past few weeks.

There’s one thing I haven’t enjoyed so much: The judging. To those of you whose work is not mentioned in this post: I’m genuinely sorry! The selection included below is just a subjective sampling.

There were many, many other entries which could easily have won had the wind at FontStruct Towers swirled in a different direction on the day.

Anyway, let’s start with a review of some of the standout entries.

Alien Folk

I love the psychedelic, folk-horror connotations of “The Eyes Have It” from jonrgrover. When I retire to roam the hollow ways in my spooky carnival wagon, I’ll be daubing these glyphs on the side.

KD erutuF from architaraz also teasingly marries the primitive and the futuristic. If that black obelisk from “2001: A Space Odyssey” had some runes carved into its base, I believe they would look exactly like this. 

zmokephantom eYe/FS from elmoyenique is an oddball amongst oddballs, a bizarre rippling italic, perhaps the first FontStruction to actually melt the bricks, while Galactic Gothic from bluemon is an ingenious attempt to hack blackletter and technoid features into a single font. 

Techno Stencil

Quite a number of entries explored a classically technoid, futuristic trope with heavy, slabby designs – fonts all ready to be stencilled on the hull of a rusting, refurbished star-cruiser. Cyberbug from elzero, Broad Band Ultrawide from japanyoshi, Future Proof from four, Stardrifter, also from elzero and Rollerball_1 from JingYo are all examples for this genre and demonstrate the excitingly diverse possibilities within it.

Future Restraint

Some visions of the future were cleaner and more restrained.

Zoltank is a constructivist-flavoured, geometric display face from FontStruct’s long-time master of retro-futuristic typography, our very own Stanisław Lem, V.Sarela (I hope that’s a compliment. It’s intended as one).

Designed for “the future of Telerobotic medicine.” I recommend reading geneus1’s full explanation for the cool and elegant G1 Prone.

Like Zoltank, Cosmoknot by time.peace is expertly FontStructed and subtly complex. I believe it to be the only outline font among the entries. It’s full of fun glyph shapes, and makes a neat, oblique reference to the NASA worm.

I also really enjoyed Neo-Tokyo from Frodo7. Hints of flicking brushwork bring life to the otherwise technoid forms.

Catch and Patch

– Two leet entries from FontStructing legends. db Catch by beate has no obvious futuristic reference or connotation that I can see but it’s a fascinating and highly original entry. I love the internal dots on the i and j, and the umläute. Are they the “catch”?

And then we come to the mysterious, the ominous FS Patchman.

From William Leverette, the designer who discovered and shared the original brick stack hack, we have the promise of a new technique called “brick patching”. This may not be the FontStruction of the future, but could it be the future of FontStructing? I’m mesmerised by the x-rayed ‘S’ in William’s sample:

The Prizewinners

– In no particular order, as chosen by you and by our guest judge Ivo Gabrowitsch. There are actually four rather than three prizewinners since I asked Ivo for one winner too many.

First up, “G1 Nanocore” by geneus1. Apparently inspired by certain whacky contemporary ideas, this is a really fun font and sensitive microscopes may reveal it to be in your bloodstream already. I recommend reading geneus1’s own description of his design.

Next, Padomela LDR from Neoqueto. This was actually Ivo’s number one choice – “the closest to my projection of the future.”

Thalamic wins twice over (only one prize though sorry!). Ivo chose tm Forward as a favourite (“I like the more organic projection of the future”) while the “people’s favourite” was the ingenious font-within-a-font “tm two in one”.

As with beate’s other entry, the relationship to the future is unclear, but Ivo could not resist the impressive qualities of db tempo.

Finally (number two on Ivo’s list) I’m really delighted that someone new has made it onto the podium for this competition. Congratulations to japanyoshi for kognigear – a simple but usable design, clearly addressing the theme with a well developed character set.

Prizewinners will be contacted by email over the next few days.

Watch this space!

We’ll be adding a few new features to FontStruct over the next couple of weeks, so please stay tuned for an announcement on that – or follow FontStruct on Twitter if that’s your kind of thing.

Thanks!

To Ivo Gabrowitsch for helping us out again with judging. Having worked for brands like FontShop, FontFont, MyFonts, Linotype, and Monotype, Ivo understands the type business like no other. His company Fontwerk is dedicated to help type designers and foundries making a living with their passion.

And, as always, thanks to our principal sponsor Glyphs.

Please remember that you can get 10% off the Glyphs desktop font editing software (OSX only) if you buy it from the FontStruct website. This is an exclusive offer and by taking it up, you will also help support the free FontStruct service.