I'm curious about this as a visualisation tool. Currently it's available in Glyphs and Robofont with Yanone's Speedpunk plugin and also natively in Fontlab 6.
What are your experiences with it? Has it made you better at drawing? Did it irrevocably change the way you see, for better or worse (imagine something
like this but for curves!)?
Image from
Alias
Comments
As a way to gauge the smoothness of a curve, it's kind of like a magnifying glass. It enables you to see things that might not be visible with the naked eye, in which case they may not matter. But it makes a good "second opinion". Sometimes if you've been staring at a curve for too long you start to not see things. A bit like how you shouldn't proofread your own writing.
But apart from seeing different curve tangent radii (and even then I don't know whether that's important, my curve looks fine when they're not lined up, and when I line them up it's not the way I want it? I think this might be because I'm still bad at drawing these kinds of shapes though!) I don't know how to use it still. I'd like to get the most I can out of this tool.
If anyone could post examples of these in use (CombsInUse.com) that would be much appreciated. cc @Mark Simonson and @Jackson Cavanaugh as I saw you both quoted on @yanone 's website.
I think it's helped me to become more aware of when my curves are contiguous and when they aren't, and I'm starting more and more to be able to tell when things aren't correct without turning on Speedpunk; I'm still using it to check my intuition, and to help me correct things when they're close but not quite right. Like Christian, I also use RMX Harmonizer to do the correction automatically when it's obvious how to fix the problem.
As with every tool, it's a good servant but a bad master, and I still need to get better at knowing when to ignore it.
One feature I wish it had would be the ability to ignore pathological situations. I know it has the fader, but even with that enabled, I find its treatment of obvious discontinuities to be really distracting, and almost make it unusable for the rest of the glyph. This is what I mean:
BTW, I would recommend trying to recreate your shape using vertical and horizontal tangents; the current construction is going to be hard on the autohinter. Here's what my /c looks like in Cormorant: Although the teardrop terminal is oriented diagonally, it is built with horizontals and verticals. The same goes for the rest of the shape.
That said, some people don't have the "eye" that others do, and need more help.