I have also made available online an Excel file that will calculate all the demensions for you as you fill in the measurements. Now we have all the basic numbers we have to use in the Illustrator file. Size, divided with Em Square size, multiplied with 1000 = New size.Here is a table that shows the numbers and how they are converted: And we need to convert the numbers to fit in. The width of the Illustrator work file we are going to make will be 1000 pt, FontLab UPM Em Square. The size of the Em Square is the height of the Ascender + Decender. What we need to find out first is the size of the Em Square.
In the example below I round off to the nearest one digit after the comma (or point, depending on where you live) only to make it less confusing. Later on we are going to convert those numbers and enlarge the drawings quite a bit, so it is better not to round off the numbers at this point. I recommend that you keep measurements exact. I prefer to use colored boxes with some transparency because the stroke thickness gets in the way. Or you can use colored boxes without a stroke like shown in the picture around the glyphs. The dimensions are summed up in the table below. It’s extremely small but easily found out by zooming into the drawings.
It is basically proportions we are after. We will convert all the dimensions to FontLab units.
As long as you have the dimensions of the Ascent and Descent to get the dimensions of the Em Square it does not matter and the results will be the same. I used millimeters in this example but you can use points or inches as well. First of all we have to measure the font / glyph drawings we are going to use.Preferences | File Handling & Clipboard.Set Guideline every 10 pt and Subdivisions to 10. Note: Learn this useful Keyboard shortcut to quickly shift between Units: Command+Options+Shift+U. Preferences | Units & Display Performance.There are few preference settings that need to be set right in Illustrator.
I am combining information from the FontLab msn forum with my own thoughts on how to prepare font design in Illustrator CS for either copy-pasting into FontLab or saving as EPS for importing into FontLab. And some of us might also have drawn few characters, glyphs, symbols or even a whole font in Illustrartor that we want to move over to FontLab to make a real font.Ĭopy and paste works but will give you unexpected results unless you set all parameters right, both in Illustrator and FontLab. Some of us have used Illustrator for years as our main vector drawing tool. Thirdly, the stats for this little blog of mine shows that just over half of the visits are from English speaking countries, people who have found this page on Google or elsewhere, only to find that they can not read a single word.Īs a start I will try to shed a little light on a topic that I have seen many looking out for: How do I move my font that I made in Illustrator over to FontLab? Hopefully I can add a tiny bit of missing parts some might be looking for. Secondly, I know for sure that for at least some of the subjects I write about there is not too much information arround. The Icelandic population is less than 300.000, so there is a limited number of people who actually can read my posts. It has always been the plan to write some articles in English and also to translate some of my previous writings from Icelandic to English. This is my first posting here in English.