# Tutorial

I shall not presume to teach aesthetics, I concentrate solely on the mechanics here.
(this tutorial is also available as a pdf version)

- Font Creation
- Creating a glyph (tracing outlines)
- Navigating to other glyphs
- On to the next glyph (consistent directions)
- Consistent serifs and stem widths
- Building accented glyphs
- Building a ligature
- Examining metrics
- Kerning
- Glyph variants
- Anchoring marks
- Checking your font
- Bitmaps
- Generating it
- Font Families
- Final Summary
- Notes on various scripts

If you wish to follow along with the tutorial, this bundle should provide you with the basic files you need.

## Font creation

First create a new font with the `New` command in the `File` menu (or by using the `-new` argument at startup).

Give the font a name with the `Font Info` command from the `Element` menu. You use this same command to change the encoding (ie what glyphs are available in the font), set the copyright message and change the ascent and descent (the sum of these two determines the size of the em square for the font, and by convention is 1000 for postscript fonts, a power of two (often 2048 or 4096) for truetype fonts and 15,000 for Ikarus fonts). (Also if you are planning on making a truetype font you might want to check the Quadratic Splines checkbox to use the native truetype format. Editing is a little more difficult in this mode though)

## Creating a glyph

Once you have done that you are ready to start editing glyphs. Double click on the entry for "C" in the font view above. You should now have an empty Outline Glyph window:

The outline glyph window contains two palettes snuggled up on the left side of the window. The top palette contains a set of editing tools, and the bottom palette controls which layers of the window are visible or editable.

The foreground layer contains the outline that will become part of the font. The background layer can contain images or line drawings that help you draw this particular glyph. The guide layer contains lines that are useful on a font-wide basis (such as the x-height). Currently all layers are empty.

This window also shows the glyph's internal coordinate system with the x and y axes drawn in light grey. A line representing the glyph's advance width is drawn in black at the right edge of the window. FontForge assigns an advance width of one em (in PostScript that will usually be 1000 units) to the advance width of a new glyph.

Select the Import command from the File menu and import an image of the glyph you are creating. It will be scaled so that it is as high as the em-square.

Select the background layer as editable from the layers palette, move the mouse pointer to one of the edges of the image, hold down the shift key, depress and drag the corner until the image is a reasonable size, then move the pointer onto the dark part of the image, depress the mouse and drag until the image is properly positioned.

If you have downloaded the autotrace program you can invoke `Element->AutoTrace` to generate an outline from the image. But if you have not you must add points yourself. Change the active layer to be the foreground, and go to the tools palette and select the round (or curve) point. Then move the pointer to the edge of the image and add a point. I find that it is best to add points at places where the curve is horizontal or vertical, at corners, or where the curve changes inflection (A change of inflection occurs in a curve like "S" where the curve changes from being open to the left to being open on the right. If you follow these rules hinting will work better.

It is best to enter a curve in a clockwise fashion, so the next point should be added up at the top of the image on the flat section. Because the shape becomes flat here, a curve point is not appropriate, rather a tangent point is (this looks like a little triangle on the tools palette). A tangent point makes a nice transition from curves to straight lines because the curve leaves the point with the same slope the line had when it entered.

At the moment this "curve" doesn't match the image at all, don't worry about that we'll fix it later, and anyway it will change on its own as we continue. Note that we now have a control point attached to the tangent point (the little blue x). The next point needs to go where the image changes direction abruptly. Neither a curve nor a tangent point is appropriate here, instead we must use a corner point (one of the little squares on the tools palette).

As you see the old curve now follows the image a bit more closely. We continue adding points until we are ready to close the path.

Then we close the path just by adding a new point on top of the old start point

Now we must make the curve track the image more closely, to do this we must adjust the control points (the blue "x"es). To make all the control points visible select the pointer tool and double-click on the curve and then move the control points around until the curve looks right.

Finally we set width. Again with the pointer tool, move the mouse to the width line on the right edge of the screen, depress and drag the line back to a reasonable location.

And we are done with this glyph.

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