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Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/1256627
Instant Fonts Sometimes it's actually easy to do things that look really hard. I'm not talking about art or magic – both areas where a lot of practice is required before the "easy" part comes. No, I'm thinking of shortcuts. Getting to point B (on the other side of the mountain) from point A (this side). You can go with the brute force approach, just putting one foot in front of the other until you're there. Or you can scout around to see if you can find the shortest path over the top. But what if you knew where the tunnel was that could get you straight through? Autotrace is like that. Most fonts start with a design idea, followed by sketches (figure 1). That's the fun part. Turning those sketches into vector glyphs can be a long, tough slog. But FontLab's autotrace can dramatically shorten the time it takes to convert art to glyphs. Slap your sketches onto the scanner or snap them with your phone camera; autotrace; and out pop ready-made glyphs. Or you could drag-drop or import an image of a word or alphabet onto FontLab's Sketchboard window; or drop multiple images of single glyphs onto a font window. Autotrace will then do its job automatically. The autotracer in FontLab 7 is fine -tuned for creating font glyphs, with a few sliders and live preview to get optimal glyph contours. You can use Simplify, Clean Up, Eraser and Font Audit to further optimize the results (figure 2). Optically separate the autotraced result on the Sketchboard to get each glyph as a single element; select them with the Element tool; and Place As Glyphs into a new font (figure 3) — FontLab will place each element in a glyph slot. FontLab's built-in optical character recognition can usually identify the glyph and name it correctly. If not, then use Glyph panel to assign the correct name. Tweak the sidebearings for each glyph in the Metrics tool (figure 4). From a hand-drawn alphabet into a working font in less than a minute! Ever so much easier than climbing over the mountain. For more information, visit: www.fontlab.com