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FontCreator – Tutorials

Designing fonts can be challenging, but FontCreator has many features that allow you to make awesome fonts. These tutorials will explain both basic and advanced topics and help you make fonts quickly and easily.

How to Make a Variable Font

There are a couple of things you need to know in order to make a variable font. This tutorial shows how to create a variable font based on existing non-variable fonts.

Import Images the Right Way

After importing an image you might come to the conclusion your glyph either lacks quality (e.g. not enough points) or has too much detail (e.g. contains too many points). In this tutorial you'll find some recommendations that will lead to better import results.

Variable Contextual Kerning – Triplets

Sometimes regular pair positioning won't do. Sure it fixes spacing between two letters, but what if it fails for a specific combination of 3 characters, like in L'Amour? Contextual kerning comes to the rescue!

OpenType Layout Features Unleashed

Everything you ever wanted to know about the internals of OpenType layout features is revealed by the interactive proofing feature as available in FontCreator. Only focus on those OpenType features relevant for the specific layout problem you need to address.

Arabic Font Design

FontCreator comes with advanced tools required for the development of Arabic fonts, covering Arabic, Farsi, Malay, Sindhi, Uighur, and Urdu. This tutorial explains several advanced topics required to make professional Arabic fonts.

Create OpenType Color Fonts

There are two scalable color font extensions that can bring color to your OpenType fonts. This tutorial provides information about both COLR and SVG color support.

Enrich Your Fonts with OpenType Features

This tutorial explains how to add gems like swashes, ligatures, and stylistic sets to your fonts.

Glyph Name Convention

This tutorial explains why glyph names are not what they used to be, but they are as important, only friendlier and smarter.

Glyph Spacing and Optical Metrics

One of the most important tasks of font design is providing balanced spacing between glyphs. It is tedious and can become boring, but not with optical metrics!

Font Inspection

While designing your font, you also want to test it for consistency, verify correct kerning pairs, and at some point, check the OpenType layout features. Here is a short tutorial about how to detect and fix incorrect positioning of diacritics.

Video Tutorials

A list of several video tutorials made by FontCreator users. Ranging from very simple tutorials to create your first font to advanced tasks like editing OpenType layout features and adding kerning to your font.

Latin Diacritical Marks - Accents

This tutorial explains how you and other font designers can use FontCreator to add support for Latin diacritical marks (accents) in your fonts.

Using Glyph Transformations

FontCreator comes with 70 powerful scripts. There are scripts that allow you to change a font into an italic or bold version. Other scripts extend a font's range by adding characters for Greek Extended, Eastern Europe, Vietnamese, Ligatures, Small Capitals, and more.

Font Metrics – Vertical Line Spacing

Several OpenType font settings relate to vertical font line spacing. This tutorial explains how to set compatible vertical metrics.

Font Family Settings for Proper Style Linking

This tutorial explains how to make fonts work like a family that goes beyond regular, italic, bold, and bold italic.

Localized Forms – Turkish i

If your fonts covers Turkish language support and also contains OpenType features, be sure to add localized forms for Turkish i.

Localized Forms – Romanian Comma Accent

The Romanian language uses S/s and T/t with a commaaccent. Due to legacy some text and/or fonts incorrectly use S/s and T/t cedilla.

Localized Forms – Catalan Punt Volat

In Catalan there are words which contain two Ls that each belong to a separate syllable, for example col·legi. In that case a “punt volat” (flying point) is used between two Ls.

Running FontCreator on a Mac

Our software is made to run on Windows, but there are ways to use it on a Mac. This tutorial shows several options that allow you to use our font editor on a Mac.

TrueType versus OpenType Fonts

Numerous websites explain what fonts are best to use nowadays, but some provide inaccurate information which makes it even more confusing. Here we explain what really matters.

Quick Start Tutorial

This tutorial is part of the user manual and is probably the quickest way to introduce yourself to FontCreator. It shows how to make a font based on your handwriting. It also shows how easy it is to test and install fonts with FontCreator.