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Participant
Jan 23, 2009 3:22 AM UTC
Question

Need help to find a program

Hola

My friend creat a font and needs to find a program to make it "work"
He creat it in Coral (they are all vectors) ask me for help, but I had never creat a font.

Do I need --or him-- to buy a program?
What is the best one?

Thanks for your help

Daniel Ulysses
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    15 replies

    David W. Goodrich
    Participating Frequently
    Mar 5, 2009 2:14 AM UTC
    The limitation to CID-keyed (OpenTypeCFF) fonts was another detail I'd failed to grasp: there's a lot going on here. Thank you, Thomas.

    David
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    Inspiring
    Feb 28, 2009 11:21 PM UTC
    The SING technology itself works in all versions of InDesign, BUT...

    - the Illustrator plug-in to make SING glyphlets only ships with the CJK versions of Illustrator, in Creative Suite configurations that include InDesign

    - SING glyphlets are currently supported only in CID-keyed OpenType CFF fonts. So you can't add a glyphlet to a regular OpenType CFF or TrueType font.

    Cheers,

    T
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    David W. Goodrich
    Participating Frequently
    Feb 25, 2009 2:58 PM UTC
    I stumbled on this month-old discussion of using Corel Draw to make fonts, and thought of Adobe Illustrator's little-known ability to behave similarly via the evolving technology of SING glyphlets. Like Corel's Save-As-TTF feature, this only works for one glyph at a time -- not surprising as the idea behind SING glyphlets is to add a few characters to an existing font. The fly in the ointment is that for now this only works for recent East Asian versions. The process is the subject of a demonstration (in English and Chinese) over on the CCJK Type blog where I commented that non-CCJK folks would also like to try this out.

    David
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    Known Participant
    Jan 26, 2009 7:02 PM UTC
    Don,

    Photoshop/Mac can be a font prima donna as well. Consider it as a shot across the bow, as sooner or later, the font issue(s), whether duplicate or currupted, will cause grief elsewhere on the computer.

    Neil
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    Jacob Bugge
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    Jan 26, 2009 3:34 PM UTC
    Illustrator can be rather particular, too.
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    Known Participant
    Jan 26, 2009 2:28 PM UTC
    Be aware that Photoshop, in particular, is very unforgiving about poorly constructed fonts, to the point where the program will not load (in Windows at least) if you have a bad font in your system (even if you don't plan on using it).

    I would be very careful about a font created directly from Corel, and would want to test it on several machines (at least) to make sure it doesn't kill Photoshop, before releasing it on the world.

    We really don't need any more defective fonts on the Internet, thank you.
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    Inspiring
    Jan 24, 2009 10:04 PM UTC
    I won't say anything unkind about CorelDraw in general, but I wouldn't trust a font generated from it as anything more than a novelty.

    If "free" is a requirement, the open source "FontForge" is an option. If an inexpensive tool with a more approachable install process is desired, then TypeTool is probably the best of the lot. Of course, FontLab Studio or DTL FontMaster are the high end options.

    Cheers,

    T
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    Known Participant
    Jan 24, 2009 7:14 AM UTC
    I hear that Corel-ware does have some redeeming features, though....<br /><br />Neil <g>
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    Known Participant
    Jan 23, 2009 8:23 PM UTC
    <lol> So then, better than nothing. But not by much!<br /><br />Neil
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    Participating Frequently
    Jan 23, 2009 11:25 PM UTC
    Yes, but like a talking dog, don't complain that it can't recite
    Shakespeare fluently, but marvel in the fact that it can talk at all!
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    Known Participant
    Jan 23, 2009 4:02 PM UTC
    Herb,
    >Save as type: TTF - Truetype font

    Interesting that Corel can do that, albeit in a less-than-optimum way. Of course it creates just one font format, and unfortunately, not OpenType. But, I wonder how compliant with font standard specs Corel TT fonts are, or how it handles kerning, screen optimization, etc.

    Neil
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    Participating Frequently
    Jan 23, 2009 5:27 PM UTC
    Neil -

    Corel Draw has had this capability for a long time - since maybe
    Version 3 or 4 on Windows 3.1!

    Calling it 'less than optimum' makes it sound even BETTER than it
    really is!

    I've never taken one of its output fonts and looked at it with
    something like Font Validator to see what's missing, but a quick guess
    would say that it's missing everything but glyphs! Although it would
    have to have some default set of parameters (over which the user has
    no control whatsoever).

    - Herb
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