I'm curious to hear your thoughts on which tools/plugins/extensions you find are really helpful to your workflow. I realize this is workflow-specific, so if you would share a little about your workflow and how the particular "extra" enhances what you do and/or makes you more efficient. I'm not asking about the font editor itself (FontCreator, FontForge, Fontlab, Robofont, Glyphs, whatever), although I realize that each offers its own benefits. I'm thinking, for example, more along the lines of the extensions for Robofont & Glyphs, external tools like Superpolator, TTX, etc. Have you used things that appeared to be useful, but really ended up not being that useful?
Why am I asking? I guess because I'd like to learn from some of the best in the industry. I am a programmer and engineer and have found that scripting has saved me sooooooo much time and am wondering about the usefulness you all have found in these kinds of supplementary tools. I'm not fishing for prospective buyers. I'm more or less wondering if I'm wasting my time because, while it's exciting to have a tool that automates some things, I really shouldn't need to do that if I had enough experience under my belt. Hopefully that makes sense.
If you feel that sharing your thoughts would be divulging your competitive advantage and therefore don't share, I completely respect that. I learn so much from all of you every day and am so grateful. I check/follow things on this site far more than any other out there.
0
Comments
I still use ScanFont 3.1 from the mid 1990s for quickly turning drawings into glyphs. It still works in Windows 10. It's a very simple and effective way to convert 1 bit images into a font. You load up a bitmap, it automatically isolates the glyphs and finds baselines, drag and drop and you have a auto-spaced VFB ready to go. For Gargle which has over 6500 glyphs, I was able to convert all my scans to VFBs in a few hours.
I've tried to use TransType for 20 years but I've always found some problem that makes it less useful than it could be. I could "kind of" convert Win OTF to Mac PS in the days when that was necessary...but the auto naming was useless. I can kind of make web fonts now but not commercial quality and it doesn't work properly from VFB. I can kind of make color fonts but the output too many bugs to be salable. I can kind of import VFB and export to other formats but it's unreliable. The round edges filter works but not perfectly. TransType would be a useful tool but I feel like they give it too little attention. Imagine being able to batch convert hundreds of VFB fonts to another format. That would be handy for me. But there's always some problem. New versions keep coming out, but they're never polished enough to be of reasonable professional use.
Other Glyphs plugins I especially lean on: Red Arrow, Show Tops and Bottoms.
Not really software but websites like Wordlist Maker are helpful for generating test strings. (There was recently a thread listing a bunch of them.)
InDesign for working specimens: Glyphs can overwrite font files in the Adobe folder so that seeing the latest revisions in situ is just a matter of exporting in Glyphs and switching to iD. (I'm grateful that font caching issues don't usually crop up with this method.)
This function was/is part of the Tuner in RMX tools for Typetool/Fontlab.
Otherwise, like Ray said, RMX tools Scaler for smallcaps and the like saves much time, and the Harmonizer can help as well.
I'm having trouble leaving behind Fontlab Studio since it's what I started with, but I also use Robofont. From a distance Glyphs seems to be the most robust and best supported font software. Many of these extensions seem crucial to the design process generally speaking and should be integrated as default app options.
With Robofont I use Ordered Generate which should be default and and I've also used FeaturePreview, Italic Bowtie, Ramsay St. and ScaleFast. I use Test Install (not an extension) mostly, which is exceptional considering I never have font cache issues. ScalingEditTool is a Robofont version of InterpolatedNudge that seems to be integrated better than the Fontlab version.
(Although “Select by Mark Color” is now a built-in feature in FontLab VI.)
Thumbs up for RMX Tools, too.
*this alongside with the non-matching masters interpolation of FL6's early builds, that is regretfully somehow gone at this moment
Besides that, I usually build my own tools - for FL5 I've had developed a pretty advanced set of tools, that I have decided not to release to the public and use for my own greedy needs
Customize your editor
GlyphsApp
Robofont
Check your fonts
Language Coverage and Unicode
Glyph Repertoire, OpenType Features
Variable Fonts
Yes, it has become something you turn on (and off) in FontLab VI. While it is seriously useful, at the same time some users (understandably) do not want it happening by accident—they want to only have automated matching of “incompatible” masters when they ask for it.
https://www.fontqa.com
Like @John Hudson I also like and use UFOStretch. It's great for generating small caps and superscript numerals.