Practical Font Design With FontLab 5

By David Bergsland

This is the final edition of Practical Font Design using Fontlab Studio 5.

It shares and demonstrates the latest, most efficient, basic font production workflow for single fonts and font families. David has spent over twenty years refining his font design techiques. This book does not offer a lot of intellectual design help. This is focused on 

• "How the heck do I do this?" 

• "How can I quit spinning my wheels?" 

• "Why is this taking me so much time?"

 

These techniques will enable you to enjoy font design by letting you focus on the actual drawing of characters with a clear plan and a workflow which does not get in your way.

 

More than that, these techniques will enable you to control the consistency so your font works as a whole. The book will teach you what a companion font is and how to design one. It will teach you an easy letterspacing technique which will allow you to simply control whether you are designing a text font or a display font. 

 

The book is a wealth of tips and techniques shared over the author's shoulder as you watch him develop his fonts. He's not teaching his method, but showing you how to develop your method of working. The book develops fourteen fonts in four font families, focused on book design. These Librum/Bream families are readily available.

 

The book will change your life as a font designer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Radiqx Press
• Release date: Jan 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524210991

David Bergsland

For me, my early life culminated with the great rebellion of the sixties. Ending up as a fine artist and heavy user of pot and acid, I needed help. I met Jesus in 1974, and my life began, for real. The Lord gave me an amazing Godly woman for my wife in 1976. I became a graphic designer, font designer, and desktop publisher. In 1991, I began teaching printing and digital publishing. That resulted in writing dozens of books and booklets about the practical processes, using InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator. In 2009, I began the transformation into an author of fiction. By the end of 2022, I had 17 novels in five series, as I have developed my craft. This book is #20, and is the third book of the sixth series. I’m using Christian contemporary speculative fiction with some Biblical romance to share stories about the reality of how Jesus touches our day-to-day lives, while being strongly focused upon Biblical truth. I put the stereotypical Bible quoters in the same category as robo-callers. I attempt to reveal Jesus within a realistic world sharing my experiences. The goal is to reveal Jesus as a loving Creator building people into what they are designed to be. I currently assume time is running short, and the final harvest is here.

Book preview

Why a final edition?

The main reason is that, in the development of my video course on font design at Udemy, I found myself doing things differently. The new workflow is more streamlined. So, this book shows that better workflow. This is a major rearrangement of the book—plus I developed four new font families to use in this book. It is also the last book on workflow development for FontLab 5, now that we’ve seen FontLab 6.

Practical Font Design has obviously found a niche within the font design community—or at least within that group of graphic designers and Web designers who want to design their own fonts. The comment from Richard Fink at Readable Web is what I’ve hoped to hear:

"If you’re looking for a brief, straightforward introduction to fonts, I recommend David Bergsland’s Practical Font Design. Unlike a lot of books that make you feel like you’re seated in the back row of a crowded lecture hall, this one feels like a private tutorial.

Bergsland takes you inside his studio, sits you down, and talks you through the basics. It keeps to a schedule, too: no bull.....

If you’ve gone looking for information about fonts, you may have noticed that there’s a lot of information about typefaces but not much about the technology of font-making. And what info there is, is scattered piecemeal here and there. And most of it is decidedly not for newbies, either. So unfortunately, in the field of fonts today, it doesn’t take much to stand out. That said, this is still a good book, and I wish there were more like it from other designers, offering other perspectives."

Richard Fink

More recently, I got this encouraging review from Christopher Murphy in Ireland:

I work as a Graphic Designer I’ve been trying to teach myself type design for the last 6-8 months now. I’ve found the lack of solid advice on offer shocking, yeah there’s plenty of books but they seem to just rehash the same old stuff without actually getting down to anything useful. After the fourth or fifth book, regardless of what they promise in the blurb you realize that the authors have never sat down & actually done any actual designing.

This course taught me more about type design than any of the teachers/lectures I had when I was doing my design degree. Theory is an important aspect when learning any subject, but when all you’re offered is theory & no practical advice you end up with just that, a lot of theory & not a clue what to do with it.

However, as usual, my early attempts prove to be an embarrassment when I go back a few years later. I know this is common among creatives—yet I have an opportunity here to rectify things. The new workflow is that much better

This is a small, one-person, low budget operation

This book services a small niche of a few thousand people, at most. As a result I’ve been forced to forego professional proofers and copy editors. This is not entirely bad as there are no copyeditors of whom I am aware with any knowledge in the font design field. However, there were huge numbers of typos in the first two editions of Part One and in Part Two. The four reedits of the Third Edition improved things a lot. It gets better each time. If you see typos or find problems, please let me know and I’ll add them to the next update.

Dealing with the typos

At this point, it’s catch as catch can. Every version gets a little better. In this final edition, I’ll fix all the ones people have shared with me, plus I’ll find many more. As I have always taught, you cannot proof your own stuff. You missed it the first time, so you’ll probably still be blind to the problems the second time. That’s why you missed the mistake in the first place. So, you will find some typos—hopefully not many.

All I can do is offer my apologies for that and try to fix as many of them as possible. My writing style has a tendency to be a little terse. I found as I edited that many assumptions needed to be explained a little. When building the third edition, I found things which were now a normal part of my production cycle that were not even mentioned. By the time I put together the video course, I had to deal with the fact that I was actually using a new workflow.

I also changed many portions of the layout. For the third edition, I wanted to use the fonts I developed for Part Two. Contenu and Buddy had become my staples in the other books I had written in the past couple of years now that I have gone to writing and publishing full-time. Now that all the distributors accept ePUB3 with embedded fonts, I can use the fonts in the ebooks also.

I’ve really had the opportunity to put these new fonts through the ringer in book design. I’ve been writing and publishing several books a year. My book design style has gone through radical revisions—much of it the direct result of the style changes implemented in Contenu and Buddy.

As a result, I needed to design two new book design families which will be done in this book. I am setting this book in these new fonts. The basic text font with text letterspacing is Librum Book [Regular], Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic (RIB&BI). I made a second set for ebooks Named Librum E RIB&BI, plus an E Sm Cap font. The companion sans is named Librum Sans. Finally I made a display version for serif headers named Bream R&I.

In this book, the copy will talk about developing a font, the name of which started as Atesqa Oldstyle. I went through two or three more names before settling on Librum. Don’t let the names confuse you. This book is the first use of these fonts. I will be updating them as I write this book and will release them at the same time as the book.

Ebooks have brought about radical changes

Another thing I wanted to deal with are the layout changes necessary to produce ePUBs and Kindle books from the content. Like other authors, I now find that about two thirds of my sales are digital books which are downloaded.

Though the typography of ePUB and Kindle books has greatly improved with ePUB3, many things are still not available. InDesign CC 2014 and newer does a pretty good job. CC 2015 adds paragraph shading which I can use in the reflowable ebooks to deal with sidebars. But the fact remains, most of the typographic niceties are simply not available to ebooks of any type other than PDFs or ePUB FXL (fixed layout). Lamenting the change is silly. This is simply the new reality and I must deal with that.

Will Web fonts solve these problems?

Now that TypeKit is part of the Creative Cloud, and they come with an ePUB license, we’ll be seeing more and more fonts in ebooks. This area has matured a lot since I first wrote this in the spring of 2011. But there is a long way to go. The font licensing fees for ebook use are still absurd. That’s why I sell my fonts with an ebook license included. I have found that sales of ePUBs with embedded fonts are better than I thought. Plus, led by the iBookstore and Kindle Fire, most of the ereaders and the apps on the tablets now support embedded fonts with no problem (other than the old e-ink Kindles and Nook).

There are many changes needed before ePUB takes it to a place where ebooks can be designed and set with excellence typographically. The high resolution tablets offer the hardware capabilities. Even the most common ereaders, the large smartphone, now have enough size and resolution to make for a decent reading experience. The real problem for typographers is non-availability of OpenType features in the general implementation of ePUB3.

Ebooks will always be typographically inadequate simply because they use HTML & CSS. The good news is that InDesign CC solves many of these coding problems. We can now offer reasonable bulleted and numbered lists with some layout control. We can get far beyond the limitations of the h1–h6+p style sets by adding tags & classes upon Export. In fact, for novels and simple, all-text non-fiction, InDesign CC gives us what we need.

Special ebook fonts

The remaining limitations are simply found in the ereaders themselves. As I write this in the summer of 2015, I am using ePUB 3 with embedded fonts with all the suppliers except Nook. However, I am still regularly astonished at how bad things are outside my little world of the retina iPad. I have determined that I really need to design separate families for ebook design with oldstyle figures, and even another for small caps if I wish to use those normal abilities in ePUBs and Mobi.

Why the complex, and sometimes strained, layout?

This book will be printed in Greyscale. The ebooks will add some color whether they are downloadable as a PDF, a reflowable ePUB, an ePUB FXL, a Kindle book, a Kindle textbook (a wrapped PDF), or whatever else my distributors ask for. In 2015 the current editions of the printed, PDF, and fixed layout editions will remain very different from the reflowable ebook editions.

This book was written, edited, copyedited, proofed, typeset, and formatted in InDesign CC 2015 using Librum, Librum E, Librum Sans, and Bream for the basic fonts on my aluminum iMac running El Capitan. It will be published through CreateSpace, Kindle, iBooks, Kobo, Draft2Digital (iBooks, Nook, Kobo, Scribd, Tolino, Page Foundry, and more), and Gumroad—plus, any other distributors I decide to add to the mix. The book is too large for Smashwords.

If you have any comments, requests, or suggestions please email me: [e-mail]

My hope is that this book is helpful to you.

New procedure

First of all, you need a simple starting procedure to begin your new font. It is easy to work on pieces of a font yet never arrive at a coherent plan. Without a plan, you can waste months or years of design time

If your font goes outside the limitations of typographic normality too far, readers will ignore your work. On the other hand, if you do not push the envelope to design something new, why bother? This book will give you a production procedure to produce the fonts you design. The designs are your problem.

I have developed solutions to many of the issues which will help you design efficiently

One of the most important is a special glyph to enable you to keep your the characters and glyphs of your font consistent effortlessly. But there are many more tips and techniques offered. The main thing to remember is that a standard operating procedure will give you a framework which enables efficiency, consistency, and excellence.

What are biggest problems when starting to build a font?

XIt has little to do with the actual shapes of the characters and glyphs. It’s much more practical than that. You need a place to work.

XWhat is important? This question is rarely asked and never answered except in this book.

XIs there a specific design order when producing a font? Actually, there is—but you need to develop your own.

XYou need a structure upon which to build. You must develop a standard workflow to get your new font named, arranged, and set up with good font metrics. You really shouldn’t do anything before this.

My goal is to give you a framework to work within as you get up to speed using this very complex piece of software. People are always surprised how complex a font is.

A new font really has nothing to help us!

When you hit Command+N [Ctrl+N] you are given a blank slate with no content. What look like characters are placeholders—a crude bitmap background with no paths.

You need to generate blank characters you can then design or you need to open an existing font and edit it.

No individual character stands on its own in a font. We need to start with at least 0-9, A-Z, and a-z. But I am getting ahead of myself a little bit. Let’s take a look at the basic process I’ve developed for FontLab 5.

Here’s a 10-step procedure to design your font

This is the most efficient way to begin a font.

To answer your basic question: yes, you can just mess around and draw a character or two or three. But that is not starting a font. When you start a font you already have a fairly solid idea of where you are going.

There is a time and place for simply playing around and developing your ideas for your new font. You need to decide on a serif style or a stroke termination policy. You need to think about and decide stroke modulation, weight, and a host of other issues.

But these decisions all take place before you start font production

Experimentation is great and it will help you see the concepts for your font. You will want to have pieces to use. They may be pencil sketches, illustrator drawings, paintings, or a clear idea in your mind. But my assumption is that this process is well on its way. You have made the basic decisions necessary for your first font. You have progressed to the place where you are ready to commit yourself to font development.

Naming The New Font

Now it’s time to begin

I wouldn’t dream of proposing a standard design procedure: I am going to design a font and let you watch. There is no standard method for creating fonts. All I am trying to do here is give a comprehensive method of designing fonts that you can adapt to your needs. This method is being written using FontLab 5. Each software app will have its own design workflow. This is the best procedure I know for FontLab 5.

Please let me know if you see anything missing, or if you want to add something else I don’t mention. Again, all I am going to do is design a font with multitudinous comments hoping to cover most of the bases.

One: Begin with a sample font or a new blank font using Open>> New

We’ll start, for this book, by opening a copy of one of the two free fonts you can download from The Skilled Workman blog under the Hackberry Font Foundry page>> Font Design>> Supplied Pieces Practical Font Design. One is called SerifBase.ttf. The other is named SansBase.ttf. Feel free to use them if you want to. They are zipped. Just click to download and expand the one you choose. Then open it in FontLab. You can delete the outlines. Or, you can simply open a new blank font, but that will take you much more time.

If you delete the outlines, you need to be careful to retain blank character slots: You do not want to go to the place where all you have is the crude bitmap. The way to do this is to Open the cap A, Select All [Command+A], and Delete. Then hit Command+] To go to the B and do the same thing. This way you’ll still have a character filling that slot and the bitmap will be gone.

Make a new folder in an appropriate location to hold your new fonts and all the pieces used. I started one in my overarching Fonts folder, within a folder called 2015 Fonts, and made a new folder named New Book. I’ll save the font into this folder. I do it this way because I’ll probably have a couple variations under a couple different names or more before I finally decide what to call the new font family.

I have found that this consistently happens every time I start a new font. I actually went through four naming systems before I decided on Librum {Latin for Book} and Bream {Latin for proclaim}. You need to check MyFonts.com and fonts.com (both owned by Monotype) to make sure someone else is not using the name.,

Setting up the Font Information

The first step is to open the Font Info dialog box. You need to make some basic decisions at the beginning.

The Font Info dialog in FontLab 5

The button to click to open the Font Info dialog box is found in the upper right corner of the font window. Below that, you can see in the second capture what you need to do if the Header panel is not open. Then you can simply click on the Font Info button. Or you can use the shortcut shown in the top capture. Once the dialog box is open, click on Names and Copyright to get started. Since we are using the SerifBase.ttf as our starting point, the Font Info dialog will already be populated with text.

Two: Fill out the Font Info dialog box

I fill out the Font Info box as much as I can

So, let’s go through the pages I recommend you fill out with some general advice (which you are free to ignore).

Recommended file info

As you can see in the capture above there are many pages of information which need to be added. This is important stuff. You can change things later. But, you need it there. Let’s start with your first choices.

Picking a name

Before I start designing, I need a working name. FontLab does not play well unless you name the font and fill in the other parameters in the Font Info dialog box which I will talk about in this chapter. We will have to make some basic assumptions right now as we get started about ascender, cap height, x-height, and descender, plus overshoots.

If you look at the list in the capture above, we start by clicking on Names and Copyright. We will skip many of these pages in the dialog, but several of them are critical and this is one of them. Because of the Windows operating systems, it is a minefield. The names must be filled out exactly as required by PC coding for Windows [more on that in a bit].

Names and Copyright

Basic set of font names:

When you click on Names and Copyright the "Basic set of font