blend tool fontlab

donat raetzo

in fontlab 5 there was the blend tool for easy interpolation. can't find this in fontlab 6 or FL6-help. how does this work now? i am not familiar with MM or variable fonts. any comments?

Viktor Rubenko

https://forum.fontlab.com/fontlab-vi/blendinterpolate-between-2-open-fonts-in-vi/msg38826/#msg38826

donat raetzo

Viktor Rubenko said:

https://forum.fontlab.com/fontlab-vi/blendinterpolate-between-2-open-fonts-in-vi/msg38826/#msg38826

thank you viktor to point me there. i thought so, i am not the only/first one

John Hudson

In FLVI all interpolation takes place in the variations panel, so in order to blend two different fonts you need to put them together as masters in a single source. This is actually pretty easy to do: you open both fonts, then in the FontInfo panel you add one as a master to the other (bottom left of FontInfo panel). You then need to set up an axis between the two masters, and assign appropriate axis values to each. Then you're pretty much ready to interpolate in the variations panel. If the two fonts do not have compatible outlines, FLVI can try to make them compatible, and these options are on by default (two toggle buttons at the top of the variations panel. However, we've had mixed results relying on those, and at least for building variable fonts we've needed to do a lot of manual outline compatibility work in order to ensure that the outlines are compatible when the font is generated, not just in the FLVI variations panel.

donat raetzo

thank you for your explainations, john. i am going to try this out.

Claudio Piccinini

John Hudson said:

In FLVI all interpolation takes place in the variations panel, so in order to blend two different fonts you need to put them together as masters in a single source. This is actually pretty easy to do: you open both fonts, then in the FontInfo panel you add one as a master to the other (bottom left of FontInfo panel). You then need to set up an axis between the two masters, and assign appropriate axis values to each. Then you're pretty much ready to interpolate in the variations panel. If the two fonts do not have compatible outlines, FLVI can try to make them compatible, and these options are on by default (two toggle buttons at the top of the variations panel. However, we've had mixed results relying on those, and at least for building variable fonts we've needed to do a lot of manual outline compatibility work in order to ensure that the outlines are compatible when the font is generated, not just in the FLVI variations panel.

Thanks much John. Not exaggerately interested in interpolation right now, but learning Fontlab VI is seriously putting to the test my nervous system.
I love many features, but the lack of straight-forwardness and the substantial differences with Fontlab Studio 5 just knock me down.