User Guide

FontLab 4
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Contours
The most important and most complex information in a font is the glyph’s
shape. All glyphs are defined as a series of contours. All contours consist of
a series of graphical primitives: straight lines and curves. Nodes - points
that know their type - define all graphical primitives.
Open and Closed Contours
Contours may be open or closed:
All known font formats require contours to be closed, but during outline
editing it may be useful to have some contours in an open form and later
connect them to each other to build final closed contours.
In FontLab it is very easy to open closed contours or to close open
contours. It is also possible to customize the appearance of the open
contours: they may be automatically filled (they are automatically closed
by an invisible straight line that connects their starting and ending points)
or not and their starting and finishing point may be optionally highlighted.