MacDirectory Magazine

Mads Hindhede Svanegaard

MacDirectory magazine is the premiere creative lifestyle magazine for Apple enthusiasts featuring interviews, in-depth tech reviews, Apple news, insights, latest Apple patents, apps, market analysis, entertainment and more.

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Different Strokes Words by FontLab Common typefaces like Times New Roman and Helvetica have a lot of straight lines and symmetrical curves - relatively easy to draw with standard vector drawing tools. But what if you want to create a script, handwriting or calligraphy font? Or a Japanese or Chinese brush style font? Not likely to need many straight lines for those and making all those flowing curves with vector tools is a real pain. The most popular font formats require that all glyphs be formed by closed contours. I.e. lines that are drawn around enclosed spaces. This is easy but still labor-intensive for geometric fonts, but truly tedious and counter-intuitive for the pen and brush style. You would really like to draw them with a pen or brush! Strokes are like that. Instead of a contour you draw a skeleton line and let the software expand it to the appropriate width and shape (Figure 1). Adjust the end caps and Voila! - it looks just like it was done with a broad nib pen or a camel's hair brush. (Figure 2). Instead of pushing and pulling around on the contour you edit strokes by adjusting the skeleton line. However, you can easily convert a stroke to a contour if you want to use the contour editing tools.

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