Custom made font not printing properly

[shenaem46642095]

Hi everyone, I did illustrations for a children's book and I made a custom font with my handwriting to go with it. It is a ttf file font and it displays fine on InDesign and fine on the PDF export, but when it prints, it displays weird - it fills in black in the holes on letters like 'a' and 'o', see image attached. I am unsure how to fix it.

I've tried embedding the font (in export settings changing the subset fonts when percent of characters used is less than 0%).

Is there anything else I should try and do, the author is doing test prints through Amazon and they aren't helpful in how to fix the issue so I thought I'd ask here for help.

Thanks!

[Kasyan Servetsky]

I am not an expert in font-making, but check the contour directions. Outer and inner contours should be in opposite directions, like so:

Otherwise, you'll get an effect as on your screenshot.
For example, in FontLab, there's a Reverse contour command for this.

[Eric Dumas]

Hi,

can you describe how you made the hole in the letters? (Called 'counter' according to this great resource Typography: The Anatomy of a Letter | Envato Tuts+ (tutsplus.com))

If you used illustrator to create the font, I expect that it would behave differently if you used Compound, Pathfinder... and if you outlined (Expand...) the design or not. 

[Eric Dumas]

How does it work when printing a page from MS Word for example.

In InDesign, you can use a copy of your finished design and select your text to Type menu > Create outlines. This should show you where the gaps are closed and let you fix it. Of course the text is not editable anymore, so you need to try it on a copy of your document.

Always make backups!!!

[shenaem46642095]

Thanks for your reply. The font was handwritten then I scanned it in, traced it with the pen tool in Illustrator, then exported each artboard (of each letter) as a svg. and I used a website called Icomoon to generate the font into a ttf file, which i installed onto the computer fine. It prints fine from Microsoft Word. 

Below is a screenshot of the a and the o in question. I've done the 'create outlines' in InDesign and I think I can see where the issue is for each. I can see where the issue is for the a in the originaly illustrator file but not for the o but I'll tweak them both and go from there.

 

Thanks for your help, I really appreciate it!