Making masters interpolation-compatible: what is your workflow?

Ramiro Espinoza

I've tried Prepolator and it works but I frequently found difficult to select certain contours or to arrange orders when there are several contours involved (for example in an AE with many overlapping contours). In such cases it is a pain and I tried to solve the problems natively in FontLab but the rutine of using scripts for im/exporting UFO is also a pain and rather slow. I recently bought Glyphs to see if I can find a better way to make masters compatible dealing directly with UFO files (my main interpolation software is Superpolator). So, I am curious about what is the workflow / tools you use for dealing with interpolation masters...

James Puckett

I draw everything in Glyphs and just keep the masters compatible when I draw them. But this only works if you limit yourself to weight and width axes.

Paul van der Laan

Actually I don’t recognise the problems you describe about using Prepolator. The “auto contour order” function is usually a good start, and using cmd-up / down works well to do tweak the order manually. I wish all my software had been designed this elegantly, and I can’t imagine living without it anymore.

William Berkson

Yea, the automatic correction tools are pretty great. Also you can go back and forth between Robofont and Prepolator, adding or subtracting nodes with the drawing tools if you need to. Maybe you can also do that on the fly in Glyphs, I don't know.

James Puckett

Glyphs can work with UFO files while other apps access the files just like most UFO apps.

Ramiro Espinoza

@Paul: When you try to equalize 3 or more masters, the automatic functions don't always work fine and (at least in the Prepolator version I tried) selecting small objects can be very difficult. I always end up doing some tasks in Fontlab. But, yes, about 98% of the work is done by Prepolator, the problem for me is how to deal with the other 2%...

William Berkson

It sounds like your problem is that it is cumbersome going back and forth between the UFO based world, and Font Lab. So your solution is Robofont or Glyphs, which are UFO based. I think the strength of UFO-based specialty programs, namely Metrics Machine, Superpolator and Prepolator is pushing people away from Font Lab, because of exactly the workflow problems you are having. They are switching to Glyphs or Robofont, which are UFO based, for better workflow. Maybe this will all change when they finish the new version of Font Lab, but that seems to be where it is now. A problem with the UFO world is that when you add up all the programs, it gets expensive, compared to Font Lab.

Jackson Showalter-Cavanaugh

You don't like my Futura-inspired fl?
(It's on my list of things to possibly change.)

Ramiro Espinoza

@William: Yes, and that's the reason I chose Glyphs over Robofont. Robofont looks attractive but I don't like its metrics/kerning interface (and I don't want to spend another 500 bucks on MetricMachine...)

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PabloImpallari

but the rutine of using scripts for import/exporting UFO is also a pain and rather slow

You don't have to import/export your entire fonts every time.
There are also FL scripts to import/export:
1) only the selected glyphs in the current font, or
2) the selected glyphs in all open fonts

So if you tweak a particular glyph, you can only export that one, and it only takes a fraction of a second.

Jackson Showalter-Cavanaugh

All you have to do is draw all the masters using the same number of points in the same order.

+ that means in the same direction (arrow icon, sorry just trying to clarify)
+ with the same contour order

Jackson Showalter-Cavanaugh

but the rutine of using scripts for import/exporting UFO is also a pain and rather slow

The currently version of UFO Central is annoyingly fast. I miss being able to take a 1-20 minute break while importing/exporting. What's more disruptive is that it forces to you to move outside of the fontlab proprietary ecosystem, a move that should provoke you to take more ownership of your design (but it doesn't necessarily require that).

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Ramiro Espinoza

@James: fine, but don't you tell me that after the final corrections/tweakings you don't end up with several glyphs incompatible. And I should also say I don't usually use "MM-style" (2 extremes) interpolations but "Superpolator-style" (3 or more masters), so at the end a tool like Prepolator, although not perfect, is a real time saver.

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John Hudson

I do as much outline compatibility work up front in FontLab. If I am then going to be using a UFO tool such as UFOstretch, I will use Prepolator to check that the outlines are compatible in terms expected by those tools. Sometimes I find that Prepolator flags as issues things that I know are compatible in my FL source. I don't know whether this is just Prepolator being overly scrupulous, or due to errors in the FL-to-UFO conversion. In any case, I don't worry too much, because down the road the interpolated instances fro UFOstretch will usually have more outline work done on them in FL.

William Berkson

James, a lot of folks seem to find Metrics Machine and Superpolator hands down better than the font lab capacities for kerning and interpolation. That seems to be what's behind a lot of people moving to UFO. Prepolator is an aid to Superpolator, but my impression is that it's really Superpolator and MM which are driving things in the UFO direction, so far as I can see. I don't know whether it's true that they are actually better because I've never tried Font Lab for those purposes. If you're happy with FontLab, great, because you make amazing fonts with it. But I think the only way to assess what's going on with the rationality of people's choice of tools is with a head-to-head comparison. I'm not the one to do it, but maybe others will.

James Puckett

Sometimes I find that Prepolator flags as issues things that I know are compatible in my FL source. I don't know whether this is just Prepolator being overly scrupulous, or due to errors in the FL-to-UFO conversion

I ran into the same problem many times with Prepolator and never could figure out what was going on. Specifically, after saving a UFO in FontLab some point structures would change in Prepolator. I don’t know if this is a problem for people working with Robofont.

William Berkson

When Prepolator flags a pair as bad, it won't interpolate properly. But some things it flags as questionable actually do work. Tal Leming confirmed this to me. You can just look in the window that shows the interpolation, though, and see whether it works or not. So you can't tell just from the 'questionable' color in the list, but have to highlight it and see the interpolation. I don't know about the question of round trips to Font Lab.

Ramiro Espinoza

Note on the side: I discovered you can open an UFO with Glyphs and copy-paste contours to Fontlab. Great! much easier and faster than using macros.

John Hudson

I discovered you can open an UFO with Glyphs and copy-paste contours to Fontlab.

That's interesting, because it implies that Glyphs is not only translating UFO XML into some standard bezier representation for display, but also caching that representation in a way that makes it available to the clipboard.

Chris Lozos

How much of that is just part of the Apple OS?

Georg Seifert

That's interesting, because it implies that Glyphs is not only translating UFO XML into some standard bezier representation for display, but also caching that representation in a way that makes it available to the clipboard.

Fontlab and Illustrator put a simple eps representation of the outline in the clipboard. That was quite easy to reproduce.

Bahman Eslami

In Robofont you can add some shortkeys to "Set Start Point" and "Auto Contour Order". I also open the Interpolation Matrix extension window to see the problems. That works okay for me.