User manual FONTLAB FONTLAB 4.6

[. . . ] FontLab 4. 6 ® for Windows® User Manual FontLab 4 Copyright ©1992-2003 by FontLab, Ltd. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the publisher. Any software referred to herein is furnished under license and may only be used or copied in accordance with the terms of such license. FontLab, FontLab logo, ScanFont, TypeTool, SigMaker, AsiaFont Studio, FontAudit and VectorPaint are either registered trademarks or trademarks of FontLab, Ltd. [. . . ] Choose the tool to perform the transformation. Click the left mouse button on the center of transformation and drag the mouse to rotate, scale or slant. Hold down the SHIFT key to constrain the transformation. 2. 3. 353 FontLab 4 Selection Operations You may copy, paste, delete and duplicate a selected part of the Sketch outline. Use the following commands from the Edit menu: Copy Paste Delete Duplicate Copy the selection to the Clipboard Add the clipboard contents to the current sketch Remove all the selected points Add a copy of the selection When you use the Paste or Duplicate command, the selection is added with a shift from the original position. You may control the amount of this shift on the Glyph page of the Options dialog box (Tools > Options). Breaking and Joining the Sketch Outline You may break the sketch outline at any point with the Knife or edit tool. To break the outline with the Knife tool, select the tool ( on the node where you want to make a break. ) and click To break the outline with the Edit tool, hold the ALT key and click the point where you want to make a break. To join two contours, position the starting or ending point of the first contour over the ending or starting point of the second contour. Hold the ALT key down while moving the point to prevent the contours from joining. 354 Glyph Window Converting to Outline Click the Replace outline button to convert the Sketch into a normal outline. FontLab will try to optimise the result using the minimum number of curves while maintaining high precision. Add to outline command you can add the contents of the With the Sketch outline to the normal glyph outline. To see the converted result simply change to edit mode ( ). If you think that the Sketch converter produced too many curves, use the Optimize command in the Tools > Outline menu to fix it: 355 FontLab 4 VectorPaint Mode VectorPaint is FontLab's unique set of tools that allow you to paint vector contours with tools that look and feel like bitmap tools. You can choose brushes, pens, freeform selections and even enter text. The idea of Vector Paint is that all the tools produce contours that combine with the existing glyph contours using our unique contour-processing technology. When you click the VectorPaint button in the toolbar, a VectorPaint toolbar will appear where you can select one of the VectorPaint "sub-tools": The type of interaction between existing and new contours depends on the selected color mode. This process is very fast and is completely transparent to you, so if you switch on the preview mode (where the glyph appears filled), the illusion of bitmap-like editing of a contour-based glyph image is very realistic. All the tools can work in 4 different color modes: Transparent Newly created vector objects that are generated by the application of Vector Paint tools do not interact with the existing glyph's contour and appear selected for easy editing. The color of the brush depends on the point where you begin drawing. If you begin in a white area, a white brush will be selected, if in black, a black brush will be selected. Use this color mode to easily extend white or black areas of the glyph. [. . . ] You need to use other classes such as the fl object of the FontLab class to interact with the font. The most important members of the Font class are: classes ot_classes features customdata Python list with the strings containing FontLab classes String containing OpenType classes (text that appears in the bottom control of the OpenType panel) List of OpenType features. Each element of the list is an object of the Feature class A string that may contain any data you want to attach to a font. This data is saved in the FontLab font file so you can use this member to store information that is not editable by FontLab tools. [. . . ]