User Guide

versions within that range (or “extrapolate” to obtain
versions outside of this range). You can edit those
intermediate versions as desired, and quickly produce a
family of weights, from just two master designs like Extra
Light and Extra Bold.
The basic idea behind Font Blending is to create a few key
designs, then let the computer do the work of producing a
family of variants. Fontographer even gives you some
powerful tools like “Change Weight” and “Remove
Overlap” to help produce those key designs quickly, from a
single base font.
Typically, you will not be able to successfully blend two
entire fonts together; there will always be a few problem
characters which can’t be interpolated. You will know when
this has happened, because Fontographer will display an
alert saying that a problem occurred during blending.
Usually almost every character will have interpolated
(unless you have chosen two very disparate fonts).
Characters which don’t get blended are frequently some of
the seldom-used symbol characters, because the upper 128
characters can vary greatly from font to font. If this is the
case, you can decide you don’t care because you never use
those characters, and go on and use the font successfully.
Or you can try to figure out why those several characters
couldn’t be interpolated like the rest, which is what this
section is about.
The blending process
Font Blend is very much like the Macromedia FreeHand
blending of one object with another. The mathematical
process for interpolation is very straightforward. Given two
points, Fontographer will calculate another point that lies
some specified fraction of the way between those points.
Referring to Figure 1, assume we drew the inner and outer
bold rectangles on the left, with the numbers indicating the
ordering of the points.
Fontographer User's Manual
10: Expert Advice Page #9