Optically Separate only works on English and Russian glyphs at the moment. You will notice that your elements now appear in an Element Frame with their names at the top. If you use the Contour tool here, the following steps will not work. Use the Element tool, which is depicted by a black arrow, to select all of your artwork. If you have imported artwork containing more than one row of characters, you can duplicate the guide by positioning the mouse on top of the Baseline guide, holding down Alt, and dragging it so that it can be used on another row of characters. The guideline width will define the cap height. Double-click the default name for the guideline and give it a name which begins with b for Baseline.Ĭhange the width of the guideline by holding down Shift, and dragging a guide out of the Baseline to the Cap Height. You will notice that these guidelines have names. Drag a horizontal guideline for the Baseline from the Ruler bar. Make sure that View > Lock > Glyph Guides is unchecked. Step Four »Īfter your artwork is imported, it will appear on the Sketchboard. Please note that the safest Adobe Illustrator EPS file format would be Adobe Illustrator 8 EPS with no preview. Here is a screen shot of the image file formats currently supported in FontLab. You can also open a cell in the Font window, and drag the artwork directly into it from a folder, like the Desktop. Use the dropdown menu with the list of different image formats to filter image files. Select the file you want to import in the open dialog. To import artwork into FontLab, open a Glyph window or Sketchboard and choose File > Import > Artwork. If you want to trace and divide an image into separate pieces at the same time you can use Element > Image > Separate and Trace.

If you want to trace an image you can use Element > Autotrace. To place this copied artwork in FontLab, switch to the Glyph Window or Sketchboard and select Edit > Paste. To paste a bitmap image or an outline from a bitmap- or vector-editing program into FontLab, select the image or outline object that you want to copy, and choose the Copy command from the Edit menu in the source application. Make sure your Preferences are set to Recognize alphabetic characters Pixels correspond to font units in FontLab, so to get a 700 unit tall “H” in FontLab, paste or import an image that has the H 700 pixels high. The same scaling applies to bitmap (raster) images. You can populate your Pasteboard in Illustrator with your entire set of glyphs and import them all together, if you wish. This means that if you want your uppercase letter “H” to be 700 units high in FontLab, you should make it 700 pt high in Illustrator. By default, font units in FontLab correspond to points in Adobe Illustrator (and other vector drawing applications). Prepare your artwork in Adobe Illustrator at 700 pt high. Conversely, EPS files exported from FontLab can be opened in Illustrator or in any program that supports AI-compatible EPS files, such as CorelDRAW, ACD Canvas, etc. Adobe Illustrator files needs to be saved in AI 8 or earlier format (AI 3 works great). You can use Adobe Illustrator or compatible applications to draw your glyphs, and then import them into FontLab. But FontLab can accept images in many other formats.įontLab can exchange outline and bitmap data via the Clipboard, and can also import artwork from files. Bitmap images are usually transferred in png, bmp, tif or gif formats. The most common format for vector data is Encapsulated PostScript (EPS). Making a Font From Color Vector GraphicsįontLab allows you to import/export bitmap images (scans, pictures) or vector (outline) data with other graphics editing applications.Detecting Element References or Composites.

Illustrator glyphs pane