Extremely Frustrating

[MusicalSamurai Participant]

I was under the impression that this was free without the need to register?

– This initially looked a bit complicated but I’ve been playing with it and I actually think it’s an awesome tool! – but it’s kicked me hard in the nuts for no reason – I’ve spent about an hour tweaking a font to be unique and to my liking and I cannot save it or export it in any way – everything says “Disabled for not logged in user” over and over so I made an account, verified it and the page STILL says I’m not logged in… But on another tab I am actively logged in… If I attempt to refresh then it warns me I’ll lose all my work – this is absolutely unacceptable – if I lose this work then this tool instantly goes from “very useful” to “absolutely worthless”…

You can’t let someone have free reign over your software and then not let them save their own work, now I will manually zoom into each character I slaved away at and try to print screen the highest resolution glyphs I can in crappy Raster format and take it elsewhere that lets me SAVE THEM AS A FONT…

Thankyou for wasting over an hour of my life…

On a side note – your editor mentions “Angel” which is supposed to say “Angle” – there’s no Angels in Maths 🙂

[FontArk-editor Keymaster]

Wow, very sorry for that incident! It’s just that we have no way to associate your work to your account if your not logged in/registered (when you start a session) in order to save it. We enable the unregistered work for evaluation before registering.

We should make a clear warning about that!

I recommend you to start over (as harsh as it sounds), you’ll gain your lost hour multiplied in 10s along the road.

Angel you say? hmm, damn. 🙂

[FontArk-editor Keymaster]

Watch this, a complete typeface in 3 weights, made in one day:

• This reply was modified 5 years, 10 months ago by  FontArk-editor.

[MusicalSamurai Participant]

Ah well this is kinda refreshing to get such a fast reply 😀

Yes, some kind of warning to state that sessions made in ‘Guest Mode’ cannot be saved at all… Not sure exactly how other companies have done this, but I’ve seen “a unique URL per User” somewhere like Just-Eat.co.uk (or some coding sites) where you can ‘place an order’ then ‘copy paste the url into a new browser’ and ‘new page loads with exact order’ (so one can tell this is part of the URL not browser cache or cookies) – this would be useful so that someone unregistered could play with your tool, if they like it then they’ll do what I did which is to try register just after making something so they can keep their work…

Now I have a single font I can keep refining saved to this account I’m happy with it – there’s a few suggestions I’d make, I’ll email some ideas in instead of typing them here just to keep dev talk off the support forum.

I haven’t watched any Videos yet (which kinda compliments your framework) – in that it’s intuitive for someone like me from a Illustrator/3D background working with points & handles on vectors quite often – a little confusing at first but nothing a little ‘trial & error’ can’t fix.

[FontArk-editor Keymaster]

Using a unique url to reconstruct a font someone is working on in his browser, not like a relatively simple thing like an online order of some sort, will require our server to be in constant connection with the user’s browser and hold a parallel project data file. That’s a lot of communication between our server and users. At the moment we only transfer server-user data when the user Save, Preview and or generates the font.

You not watching our videos is not only a compliment to our framework but to you as well, you’ll be surprised how rare it is that someone is getting hold on Fontark just like that. But, I have a feeling that once you’ll watch a video or two you’ll discover few things/features you couldn’t expect.

Fontark’s core and most important (to us) capability is the Glyphs sync – the new way we have developed to connect all the glyphs in the font! We made it dead-simple, yet it is impossible to intuitively discover or understand it, it has to be introduced to you one way or another to get it in the system your intuition is based on 🙂

The thing is, that this specific glyph sync feature, combined with the Skeleton and Matrix systems is the leap in type design technology we made Fontark for, it saves up to 90% !!! of the work and time of the design stage in type design, There are many other type design tools but they all work in the same way in which you have to work on each glyph individually. their UI and functionality is probably superior to Fontak, and they also have a lot of necessary features, related to the production stage of type design we don’t have yet at this beta stage, but it’ll take you a month of concentrated work to come up with a basic font with any of them :/

[MusicalSamurai Participant]

Well all is good, I can’t say much else 😛

Although that last point of taking a months work in ‘other programs’, I’d like to say that as someone who knows how to use Illustrator; I’m able to design & created all my desired Glyphs in under a day – this including a simple method like FontArk called ‘instancing’ where I can have 96 objects attached to ‘Object A” and then design “Object A” to have all the others update alongside it – then further refinement to each character to make them ‘individual’
– Of course this omits the amount of time I’ve actually spent with Illustrator to begin with whereas FontArk is much more intuitive for a first-timer & a lot faster at “specifically making Fonts” than Illustrator will ever be for someone without the prerequisite knowledge 🙂

[FontArk-editor Keymaster]

I talk about experienced Illustrator users!
You can make 96 objects under a day, but that’s not a font, and anyway what you can do in Illustrator under a day I can do with Fontark under an hour, and use the rest of the time for development, spacing, optical corrections and weights extraction. The above video shows 6 hours of work, mostly devoted to the font development and styling, resulted with 3 fully operational weights in OTF format.

But all of this is just to emphasise technological capabilities and advantages, obviously type design is not racing, and it may take someone 10 years to complete a font even with Fontark, it is about design after all, it is art not and exact science with one correct answer that can be measured 🙂

• This reply was modified 5 years, 10 months ago by  FontArk-editor.

[MusicalSamurai Participant]

Touché!

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