User Guide

FontLab 4
696
Ma c r o To o l
With FontLab you can define special editing tools that are entirely written
in Python. By default FontLab provides 3 sample tools: Curve, Line and
Drops. To activate a tool:
1. Open a glyph for editing in the Glyph window.
2. Select the tool in the leftmost list of the Macro toolbar.
3. Click on the button on the toolbar to activate a tool.
Activate one of the standard editing tools (on the Tools toolbar) to finish
using the macro tool.
The default macro tools do the following:
Line tool - draws lines. Click the left button anywhere and drag the mouse
to draw a line. If the nodes are visible (View|Show layers|Nodes) you can
continue defining a new contour by drawing a new line from the end node
of the previous line.
Curve tool does the same but draws curves. It emulates the curve drawing
process that is common for Macromedia Fontographer
®
and Freehand
®
.
Drop tool - just a whimsical example – when you drag the mouse it adds a
series of filled circles of random radius.
We will not document the process of creating new tools here. It is a
relatively complex programming job. If you are interested, please visit our
website for more technical documents related to FontLab macro
programming.