Hi, I'm brand new to this forum. Happy to find it. Seams to be a pretty good bunch of font neards
here. Back in the old days I used Fontographer for producing some fonts, nowdays I use FontForge mostly for correcting glyphs, hints and kerning to the fonts I'm using for the moment. As I am a Webdesigner that love fonts I some days agoo was into a problem that I just have to solve in some way. The problem is/was that I had to use one font for headlines in all the slides of the site. Since the background photos of each slide are different with very various colors the solution was a Outline font with black outline and the body white!!??
Problem at once... the body is transparent as default and this is not possible to achieve in "FontForge" or any vectorbased font design softwares. I got advice in another forum to get "TruFont" which should manage this kind of handling. I have installed and played arround with this new software, I like the simple look and function but I can't find the function for making the font with two colors ?? Can't find any documentation or tutorials either...?
I would be very happy if someone here have answers or ideas how to solve this or how I can find more information/documentation for "TruFont"
Thanks for taking time reading this.
Thomas
Comments
I solved it for the moment by importing the font in FF and editing...erasing the outline and just keeping the body that now becomes filled. So in the webeditor I Copy the headline and change this copy to the bodyfont I produced and fill this with white and place it beneeth the outline headline... also a little timeconsuming but works for the moment.
And I know I will have this problem later, so I just have to solve this in a better way
https://github.com/rougier/freetype-py/pull/55#issuecomment-298212985
The technical term is perhaps " stroke and fill with two different colors".
Hin-Tak I don't know if this is what you refer to in your link?
But there may be other ways in which to achieve the visual effect you are seeking for text without making such a font.
One way would be to experiment with making two separate fonts — one with the outline shape and one with the fill shape — and overlapping them using CSS, e.g. two identical text strings in two separate divs layered one on top of the other. That method has the benefit that, like in a chromatic font, you would be controlling the outline in the glyph design stage.
An easier method, but perhaps one that isn't visually acceptable, would be to outline and fill the text directly in CSS, i.e. have just one font, representing the fill to be coloured white, and apply a black outline in CSS.
Feels like I'm on the right track making two fonts for the different content...
Muchas Gracias
Btw, just below the url I posted is the svg example - of converting glyph shapes to svg. You can then edit it with your favorite vector graphics editor (adobe illustrator or inkscape).
By the way... no one is in to "TruFont"?? Got advice that I could fix this things directly in that software...
I wouldn't presume that. My understanding is that part of the impetus for the development of TruFont was to move beyond the limitation of the moribund FontForge development. Certainly, not all font design programs have equal capabilities.
Yes John, thanks. That's why I downloaded "TruFont". Looks and feals quite neat. But it's a little early to judge... some bugs and some more functions to handle.
There have been reversed fonts before in normal font formats, and while they do create complications (for kerning, for instance), they work. But fundamentally they are done with transparent letters and a black area around the letter shape.
That is all that is technically possible in normal/classic font formats.
John explains well how color fonts work in the new color-variant formats.
Was also wondering if someone knew something about "TruFont"? It's hard to find any information
Disclaimer: I work on minor parts of TruFont from time to time.
I will sure follow the development progress.
Thanks Dave. Shall look into that and see what I can do... not familiar with "RoboFont"
Hi again Dave... looked at RoboFont and got a problem directly... it's just for Mac. I'm a Windows user so that was it...
I had the same non-Mac problem though. It's a shame that this is the main barrier to entry to font design. The only apps worth their weight are Mac-only Maybe Trufont can get the non-Mac-job done one day.
@Erwin Denissen's Font Creator is often overlooked — maybe because it's Windows-only —, but it is a good tool, and was one of the very first with colour font support.
I'm still using FontLab Studio 5 on Windows on a daily basis, and FontLab VI is being developed for both Mac and Windows.
Not so expensive either...
Can't wait to 2020 or 2021
Just free trial for Mac... so I skip it for now
There's a support article about what I believe is exactly the type of font you're talking about? http://help.fontlab.com/fontlab-vi/Color-Outlines/