Making Weights

Charles Borges de Oliveira

I have a bold sans serif and was wondering how others would go about producing the light weight from it. Am I wrong to try to reduce the weight in fontlab and then go through and adjust and fix every glyph. Is there a better approach to it. My goal was to make the light and then base the other weights off of the two. Any tips would be appreciated. Thank you for your time.

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

I would only use an automatically generated weight as a background mask as a guide to doing it completely manually... unless it's for a client who values speed way more than quality.

Charles Borges de Oliveira

Good Idea. Thanks Hrant.

Chris Lozos

When you make huge jumps in weight, there are differences to overcome that each opposing weight requires.  The growth is not linear.  Spend more than enough time on the extremes to understand what they require for themselves.  There is no simple mechanical method for this.  Even interpolations require intervention at certain points.

Charles Borges de Oliveira

Thank you Chris.

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Ray Larabie

Even if just for exploration, try building a uniform width hairline. Maybe only 10 or 20 units thick. Move the weight axis slider and you might find a pleasing light weight somewhere between 150-250. It will still retain some of the thick/thin of the heavier weight. Sometimes the lightest weight loses too much flavor on the way to hairline but often it produces exactly what I was looking for.

Charles Borges de Oliveira

That is nice Lata. Thank you for posting it. Ray that is excellent advice. Thanks!!

Mads Davidsen

I am not sure if it is of any help, but there is a plug-in called RMX Scaler by Font Remix Tools. I am not familiar with FontLab, but the plug-in is compatible with that.

Kent Lew

RMX Scaler requires a font file to be set up as a MM in order to do its thing. So, it presupposes at least two weights already.

John Hudson

A somewhat brutal tool, but sometimes useful for roughing in a secondary weight, is Karsten Luecke's Glyph Tweaker plugin for FontLab.

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

Is it much better than FontLab's built-in (Fontographer-era, AFAIK) auto–weight-change?

John Hudson

Much, much better. Glyph Tweaker allows you to control height, width, x-stem gain, and y-stem gain as independent values.

I think Karsten made it, as the name suggests, with fairly minor adjustments to weight or proportion in mind: just tweaking. I use it more like a sledgehammer.