Illustrator sucks at outline fonts.

Question

I am creating a font using simple strokes in Illustrator and FontSelf as well as FontLab to create a family of fonts. The stroked fonts look as expected, but once I create them with either FontSelf or FontLab, there is an inordinate amount of points added to the outlined shape; either if I outline them before creating the font or afterwards.

My question is twofold: 1.) why does illustrator suck at outline simple strokes, and 2.) is there amore efficient workflow that would retain the personality of the font without having to remove a bunch of cruft-points that were introduced during the outline process?

[The image shows the issue from the original glyph created by strokes, font, converted to outlines (with way too many points), and after the Simplify command]

Bobby Henderson · Answer

A calligraphy brush stroke is usually going to generate a lot of anchor points when it is expanded. The stock Simplify command in Illustrator works only so well. If you happen to have the Astute Graphics suite of Illustrator plugins you could use a combination of Vector First Aid and PathScribe to more intelligently reduce the amount of anchor points along the paths as well as move anchor points to horizontal/vertical tangency locations -like what you see in most better-authored fonts.

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