importing custom backgrounds to trace – and kerning question

[PeskyVarmint Participant]

Hi!

Firstly, thanks for creating what seems to be an awesome app! I’ve been looking for a useful font creator that works on windows for ages, I’m so pleased I’ve finally come across this!

Secondly, I watched the video where you created a calligraphic ‘c’ by tracing over another letter (here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPimX3wu7h8). Can you tell me how to import my own letters to trace, I tried using the watermark custom option but nothing happened to let me make them custom.

Thirdly, will there be an option in the future to kern individual letter sets?

Thanks again

Danielle

[FontArk-editor Keymaster]

Hi Danielle

Thanks for the compliments! It is good to hear that you find our app useful, hope you’ll enjoy it to max.

The watermark feature only displays fonts(!) either installed on your comp or stored online as webfonts. It’s a bit of a contradiction, but if you have vector letter design in other app, you have to somehow implant it into a font file, then install it, and then display it as watermark by calling the font by it’s familyname in the watermark dialog.

That’s the regular way to do it. Another way to do it without using a font file will be by converting your letter to plain svg format, copy the letter’s svg path code, and paste it into the right paste it into the right place in Fontark scripts in your browser. That’s somekind of hack that requires basic code knowledge and understanding the structure or our scripts. If it is very important to you send me a message here and i’ll try helping you with it.

We intend to add kerning and other advance opentioe features in the future, we will speed up the development according to usage, so the more fonts you’ll make the faster we will be able to push the development ahead 🙂

[PeskyVarmint Participant]

Thanks for the quick reply!

It’s not a big deal, I just do a lot of sketching on paper first, so it would be a bit easier to do the final thing if I could just trace over images of sketches. But if it’s not easier at all I’ll try and make do, I guess I’ll get back in touch if I want to try the code hack (unlikely!).

Although it might be handy if you could give instructions on how to import a font file for the watermark dialogue to access – I have another font maker app that I could not get to grips with, but I think it is a fairly straight forward job to import images and assign them to letter spaces, if nothing else! But if even that is super complicated then really don’t worry about it.

I’m having so much fun playing with the features already there and it’ll take me a good while to exhaust the possibilities! Thanks again, Danielle.

[FontArk-editor Keymaster]

Importing an image to the watermark function is on our dev list as well.

Instructions for using the watermark you can find here: http://fontark.net/farkwp/aprils-upgrade/
Basically you can display there most of the fonts that are installed on your computer simply by typing it’s family name in the Font-family field as shown in the video on that page at 4:11. So you should…
1. get/generate a font
2. Install it on your computer
3. Restart your browser (to have the new font listed in your browser’s memory)
4. Type the font’s family name, in the Font family field in the Watermark properties dialogue.
5. click Enter.

You can also display any live webfont you have the URL of, simply by pasting the URL of the font into the Font family field.

The only limitation is that you don’t have control on the font style :S that means that if you have several styles to a font (ex. light, regular, bold, italic, etc’) you can’t predict which one of them will show up (usually the regular style). It’s a hassle when you want to display a certain style of a font family, you’ll than have to uninstall all the other family members so the right one will show up, so if you generate a font specially for that purpose, make sure you give it a unique family name.

I’m pretty available for demonstrating and guiding users by screen sharing, if you’d like one just message me and we’ll schedule one. It’ll save you a lot of time figuring stuff on your own 🙂

Here’s a link to a set of very recommended 4 new video guides we’ve recently published

• This reply was modified 8 years ago by  FontArk-editor.

[Author]

Posts