Free FontLab VI Public Preview for Mac OS X available now! :)

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  • Mark Simonson
    Mark Simonson Posts: 1,736
    Staving off boredom.
  • Ramiro Espinoza
    Ramiro Espinoza Posts: 839
    edited October 2015

    @Michael Jarboe Pure ergonomics. If you have to spend days kerning a font it's much more confortable to use a game controller. 
  • Charles Borges de Oliveira
    Charles Borges de Oliveira Posts: 71
    What happens when you shoot on the controller. Can you blow up letters? Sorry, just kidding.
  • Christian Thalmann
    Christian Thalmann Posts: 1,988
    What are Tunni lines?
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,890
    They're one of the entirely new features in FontLab VI. (see: http://www.fontlab.com/font-editor/fontlab-vi/)

    It's named after mathematician Eduardo Tunni. Visually, it's a dotted blue line drawn between the two BCPs that control a curve.

    Double-clicking on a Tunni line balances the handles for the curve.

    Dragging on it allows you to make a curve more or less tense without affecting the relative proportions of the two BCP handles.
  • Dave Crossland
    Dave Crossland Posts: 1,430
    edited November 2015
    mathematician Eduardo Tunni

    Eduardo Tunni is also a type designer, who I've commissioned a lot of fonts from, plus this 3 part video series explaining the theory behind this feature :)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVYX72rHemA

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWwr_czOp-w

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BM0IlJ6jDO4
  • Ramiro Espinoza
    Ramiro Espinoza Posts: 839
    I think Eduardo is engineer, not mathematician.
  • Christian Thalmann
    Christian Thalmann Posts: 1,988
    OK, so this is basically what Glyphs does with the curvature presets, except that FL offers a graphical rather than a numerical representation, which allows for a continuum rather than a set grid of options. Nice! I'm looking forward to seeing this implemented in Glyphs.  :smile: 
  • attar
    attar Posts: 209
    Dave, what sort of interest did you have into Tunni lines? ie. did you not try to get them implemented into FontForge/Metapolator since you commissioned these videos?
  • George Thomas
    George Thomas Posts: 645
    edited November 2015
    Christian, have you tried the Tunnify script in Glyphs? When you run it on a glyph it makes adjustments to the curves. It may be of help to you.

    From the Read Me file: Looks for all path segments where at least one handle is selected. Then, evens out the handles of the segments, i.e., they will both have the same Fit Curve percentage. Can fix Adobe Illustrator's zero-handles (segments with one handle retracted into the nearest node). The idea for this script came from Eduardo Tunni (as colported by Pablo Impallari), hence the title of the script. I have never seen Eduardo's algorithm though, so my implementation might be a little different to his, especially the treatment of zero-handles.
  • Dave Crossland
    Dave Crossland Posts: 1,430
    edited November 2015
    Dave, what sort of interest did you have into Tunni lines? ie. did you not try to get them implemented into FontForge/Metapolator since you commissioned these videos?
    As far as I know, nobody in FontForge or Metapolator's user/developer community was excited by Tunni's theory.

    There was a FL5 python script, by Andres Torresi and Eduardo Tunni, which I don't think was ever ported to FontForge, that 'auto-tunes' Beziers; I don't know where the original is, but I remember that Pablo Impallari ported it to Glyphs with Rainer, and that is at https://github.com/mekkablue/Glyphs-Scripts/blob/master/Paths/Tunnify.py

    Metapolator uses Hobby splines, not Beziers, so the theory isn't directly relevant to Metapolator. Simon Egli wrote a RoboFont script that does a similar 'auto-tune' correction to Beziers using the Hobby algo, which ended up living in https://github.com/jenskutilek/Curve-Equalizer/blob/master/RoboFont/Curve EQ.roboFontExt/html/index.html  

    FontLab has invented the interactive Tunni Lines UX. 
  • Elizabeth Carey-Smith
    Elizabeth Carey-Smith Posts: 39
    Oooooh excited to try this out. Has anything changed in the interface in terms of sidebearings for italics?
  • Chris Lozos
    Chris Lozos Posts: 1,458
    Yes! Elizabeth, Interface has changed quite a bit! You can have slanted sidebearings now. Demo it and play around.
  • Adam Twardoch
    Adam Twardoch Posts: 515
    To be more specific, the "Tunnify" action is implemented in FontLab VI as Contour / Balance. On top of that, we've extended Eduardo Tunni’s concept and invented the interactive graphical UX, and we’ve chosen to name the lines that connect the BCP Tunni lines and that can be used to control the segment Tension, to honor Eduardo’s contribution. I like how Eduardo’s name also evokes the English verb "tune". 

    FontLab VI is not the first app to allow control of the segment Tension of course. Petr van Blokland has implemented a "tension grid" in RoboFog many years ago, and Georg Seifert has reimplemented Petr’s approach in Glyphs. 

    In FontLab VI, we have slanted sidebearings. They are controlled by the Italic Angle and Caret Offset settings in the Font Info panel. 
  • Ray Larabie
    Ray Larabie Posts: 1,432
    edited February 2016
    Does anyone know if the generate syntax will work the same in the new version? For example:

    Ctrl-G n+dotlessj=eng or comma_=quotesinglbase.

    Is the bug for the | (bar) command still there? In the current FontLab Studio, it functions like the < command. For example:

    o+|30dotaccent is supposed to place the dotaccent 30 units to the right of center but instead, it places it 30 units from from the left siedbearing.


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