User Guide

involve a twist of the wrist and pen, and if you carefully
study the calligraphy manuals, you will find these little
secrets. Also, most letters are made with two or more
strokes joined together invisibly. An “O” is made from a
downward left stroke and a downward right stroke, not one
stroke all the way around. These conventional stroke
combinations are shown in most calligraphy manuals and
are easy to learn. Remember, you don’t have to be a
calligrapher, you just have to learn to think like a
calligrapher’s pen.
If you are interested in oriental calligraphy, dip a Chinese
brush in ink and press the soft tip to paper, pushing the
bristles about half way down and to one side and then
gradually lifting it and tapering off to the other side. Note
the shape of the ink stroke. The movement of the brush and
the look of the marks it leaves is considerably more complex
than the workings of the western pen. However, Chinese
calligraphy involves a graphic language of a very small
number of simple stroke shapes combined into more
complex characters. There is a particular way to make
dots, horizontal lines, vertical lines, lines angled left, lines
angled right, corners and endings of lines. You can find
these in books on Chinese calligraphy.
You can also draw with a pen or brush roughly, without
paying much attention to any calligraphic tradition, but the
instrument will still leave characteristic marks. Those are
what you want to remember.
Turning to Fontographer, you might wish to start by copying
some calligraphic hand that you admire. There are three
ways to do this. One is by scanning the original in and auto-
tracing it. For the instructions on that method, refer back to
the beginning of this chapter.
The second way is without a drawing tablet: Choose a
couple letters that are most characteristic of the hand you
are going to recreate. You might start with the
lowercase “l” and “o” as they contain the basic straight and
rounded strokes on which the rest of the alphabet will be
based. One way to do this quickly is to use corner points for
every point you place. That will rough out the letter for you.
Then go back and change the points ruling what should be
curves to curve points. Adjust, check the black image in
Preview, readjust. If you draw an “o” that you think works,
Fontographer User's Manual
2: Creating New Fonts Page #27