koo@tcville.HAC.COM (01/19/91)
I have seen occasional questions on the net about creating colorfonts, but I
haven't heard anyone mention Calligrapher. So I'm posting some information
about Calligrapher, for those who are thinking of creating their own custom
fonts.
Calligrapher has been out for quite a few years now, and there are no major
bugs in the program. It does not have the fanciest interface, but is not
copy-protected and does what a font editor is supposed to do:
- you can specify the font size
- You can define the character offset and kerning.
- there are some global operations that you can perform on all the
fonts (e.g. outline, patterns, color, shadowing), and you can preview
it and try them out before you save the changes
- Calligrapher maps each character to the ASCII character set (about
128?)
- it lets you copy existing characters/entire fonts for editing, or
you could design a font from scratch (for a small number of
characters).
- Calligrapher really excels in performing global operations on an
entire set of characters in a font. Individual character editing
can be done, but is quite limited.
Someone on the net once told me how to design the font characters
using DPaint, and then import it back into Calligrapher (I still
have this info somewhere --- send me e-mail), so you could use
the more powerful features in DPaint for extensive editing.
- you can create Colorfonts (i.e. fonts that are more than just black
and white) and use it with other software packages (e.g. DPaint III)
- it also lets you load/create a fill pattern for the font, outline
the font, change its color, make a shadow. You can have up to 7-10
layers of this
For example, a bottom layer in a solid color can be placed under
a top layer with a pattern. If the bottom layer is slightly larger,
then you'll have a font that is patterned and outlined in a solid
color! Doing things like this to fonts is trivial in Calligrapher.
- No, it doesn't create Postscript or Compugraphic fonts, only bitmapped
fonts in two (or more) colors.
Frances (koo@tcville.hac.com)