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FontCreator – Tutorials

Designing fonts can be challenging, but FontCreator has many features that allow you to make awesome fonts. These tutorials will explain both basic and advanced topics and help you make fonts quickly and easily.

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Creating Connecting Handwritten Fonts

Learn to design handwritten fonts with OpenType features for word-initial, word-final, and pseudo-random glyph substitutions.

Fractions Using Reverse Chaining Substitution

Implement precise fractions in OpenType fonts using rsub, improving fraction formatting without affecting non-fractional text.

Optimizing Webfonts by Reducing Character Sets

Reducing the character set of webfonts by subsetting unnecessary glyphs can significantly enhance website performance by decreasing load times and file sizes. This process ensures that only the essential characters are included, resulting in faster, more efficient webfont usage.

Subsetting Variable Fonts with FontCreator

FontCreator lets you subset variable fonts by reducing variation space and adjusting axis ranges, while also allowing you to set a different default font instance within the design space.

Single-Line Fonts for Engraving and Cutting

Learn how to design single-line fonts with FontCreator for cutting, engraving, and CNC applications. This guide covers creating open contour glyphs optimized for these tools, despite their lack of support in standard text layout engines.

TrueType vs. PostScript: Font Design Essentials

This article explains the differences between TrueType and PostScript curves in font design and key considerations for exporting fonts. It also discusses how these choices affect variable fonts and platform compatibility.

Switch Glyphs with Feature Variations

This tutorial shows how to switch a dollar sign with a single vertical stroke to an alternative design with a broken bar, based on the variation instance (in this case the Weight axis) of a variable font.

A Guide to Distributing Your Fonts

This article explores strategies for distributing fonts, covering selling through marketplaces, direct client licensing, and contributing to open source projects, each with unique benefits and challenges.

How to Make a Variable Font

There are a couple of things you need to know in order to make a variable font. This tutorial shows how to create a variable font based on existing non-variable fonts.

Import Images the Right Way

After importing an image you might come to the conclusion your glyph either lacks quality (e.g. not enough points) or has too much detail (e.g. contains too many points). In this tutorial you'll find some recommendations that will lead to better import results.

Variable Contextual Kerning – Triplets

Sometimes regular pair positioning won't do. Sure it fixes spacing between two letters, but what if it fails for a specific combination of 3 characters, like in L'Amour? Contextual kerning comes to the rescue!

OpenType Layout Features Unleashed

Everything you ever wanted to know about the internals of OpenType layout features is revealed by the interactive proofing feature as available in FontCreator. Only focus on those OpenType features relevant for the specific layout problem you need to address.

Arabic Font Design

FontCreator comes with advanced tools required for the development of Arabic fonts, covering Arabic, Farsi, Malay, Sindhi, Uighur, and Urdu. This tutorial explains several advanced topics required to make professional Arabic fonts.

Create OpenType Color Fonts

There are two scalable color font extensions that can bring color to your OpenType fonts. This tutorial provides information about both COLR and SVG color support.

Enrich Your Fonts with OpenType Features

This tutorial explains how to add gems like swashes, ligatures, and stylistic sets to your fonts.

Glyph Name Convention

This tutorial explains why glyph names are not what they used to be, but they are as important, only friendlier and smarter.

Glyph Spacing and Optical Metrics

One of the most important tasks of font design is providing balanced spacing between glyphs. It is tedious and can become boring, but not with optical metrics!

Font Inspection

While designing your font, you also want to test it for consistency, verify correct kerning pairs, and at some point, check the OpenType layout features. Here is a short tutorial about how to detect and fix incorrect positioning of diacritics.

Video Tutorials

A list of several video tutorials made by FontCreator users. Ranging from very simple tutorials to create your first font to advanced tasks like editing OpenType layout features and adding kerning to your font.

Latin Diacritical Marks - Accents

This tutorial explains how you and other font designers can use FontCreator to add support for Latin diacritical marks (accents) in your fonts.

Using Glyph Transformations

FontCreator comes with 70 powerful scripts. There are scripts that allow you to change a font into an italic or bold version. Other scripts extend a font's range by adding characters for Greek Extended, Eastern Europe, Vietnamese, Ligatures, Small Capitals, and more.

Font Metrics – Vertical Line Spacing

Several OpenType font settings relate to vertical font line spacing. This tutorial explains how to set compatible vertical metrics.

Font Family Settings for Proper Style Linking

This tutorial explains how to make fonts work like a family that goes beyond regular, italic, bold, and bold italic.

Localized Forms – Turkish i

If your fonts covers Turkish language support and also contains OpenType features, be sure to add localized forms for Turkish i.

Localized Forms – Romanian Comma Accent

The Romanian language uses S/s and T/t with a commaaccent. Due to legacy some text and/or fonts incorrectly use S/s and T/t cedilla.

Localized Forms – Catalan Punt Volat

In Catalan there are words which contain two Ls that each belong to a separate syllable, for example col·legi. In that case a “punt volat” (flying point) is used between two Ls.

Running FontCreator on a Mac

Since 2024 our font editor runs on both Windows and macOS, so this tutorial is obsolete.

TrueType versus OpenType Fonts

Numerous websites explain what fonts are best to use nowadays, but some provide inaccurate information which makes it even more confusing. Here we explain what really matters.

Creating a Font and Editing Glyphs

This tutorial is probably the quickest way to introduce yourself to FontCreator. It shows how to make a font based on your handwriting. It also shows how easy it is to install and use the font.