User Guide

appear when printed out to be written as a continuous line,
but it is not easy. The general principle is that you must
design a standard shape for both incoming and outgoing
strokes and use them as part of every character. The
margins of characters need to be set so that the outgoing
stroke of one letter overlaps the incoming stroke of the
following character. This takes some careful
experimentation with and slight manipulation of each
character’s incoming and outgoing strokes. But once you get
it to work right, it will look quite natural, especially if here
and there you leave an incoming stroke off. You will want
to avoid kerning as much as possible and should design an
alphabet set that needs very little.
For Chinese or Japanese calligraphy or to give an oriental
flavor to a western alphabet, try a cordless pen and drawing
tablet with Fontographer set to pressure-sensitive pen only.
It’s very quick and sensitive and will take a little getting
used to, but with some practice you will be able to
construct Chinese characters with only minor need for point
adjustments. If you are quite serious about working on a
Chinese font, you will probably want to work out a library of
the basic strokes and copy from that storehouse when
building new characters. The Remove Overlap command
will be very handy. You can always adjust each new
character for balance and style.
Creating variable weight characters
Variable weight characters give the effect of being drawn
with a brush. That is, they can have wide and thin areas.
Fontographer’s freehand drawing tool can be used directly
with the mouse or with a pressure-sensitive pen and
digitizing tablet to give you these effects.
To use the pressure-sensitive pen:
1. Double-click on the freehand drawing tool.
The Freehand Tool Setup dialog appears.
2. Click on the Pressure sensitive checkbox.
Fontographer User's Manual
2: Creating New Fonts Page #31