Assembling glyphs in FontLab 7, Part 1 (with Adam Twardoch)

FontLab 7 has several methods that you can use to assemble your glyphs from predefined parts.

With element references, you can draw one or more contours once and then reuse them in other glyphs. An element reference doesn’t have a “source glyph”—any occurrence of an element reference is the source. Components are similar, but the content of a component lives in one designated source glyph layer, and other glyphs point to it.

If you create corresponding anchors in a base and a mark glyph and then build a composite glyph, FontLab automatically positions the mark over the base where you want it. Auto layers are composite glyphs that FontLab creates from simple text recipes, automatically updating the positioning and shape of the components when the source glyphs change.

With the right combination of these methods, you can easily extend your glyph set in one or many masters.

Buy or try #FontLab at http://fontlab.info

FontLab 7 is a pro font editor for Mac and Windows. Create, open, modify, draw, space, kern, hint and export desktop, web, color and variable OpenType fonts for any Unicode writing system, from Latin, Cyrillic and Greek, to Arabic, Hebrew and Indic, all the way to Chinese, Japanese, emoji, symbols and icons. FontLab offers a modern platform not just for established type designers and font developers, but also for graphic designers and illustrators who wish to customize existing fonts or create their own type designs.