Font editor to show outlines thicker?

Thomas Phinney

Is there any font editor that has an option of showing glyph outlines thicker than one pixel?

I did a whole bunch of quick screen shots for an article I'm writing for a magazine. They want higher-res versions, which I can do... but taking a screen grab showing font outlines at one pixel wide and 2560x1440 (or even 3840x2400) and then reducing it to print sizes will result in a nearly-invisible hairline.

I could redo all my examples using Illustrator and stroked outlines with no fill. Just curious if there is another way.

(Modifying FontForge and recompiling it is not a reasonable option for this purpose, I don't think. Although I do appreciate that such would be an option with a libre app, which is cool.)

Jackson Showalter-Cavanaugh

It's possible to change the selected stroke thickness in Robofont's preferences. If you emailed, I'd bet Frederik could tell you three lines of python you'd need to change the default stroke thickness too.

For Illustrator, I've previously used this script to turn make flat vector art that includes nodes and handles: http://www.jongware.com/binaries/drawArtHandles.zip (source: http://forums.adobe.com/thread/731731).

Dave Crossland

I filed a FontForge feature ticket - when do you need this by?

Georg Seifert

You can print from Glyphs showing the handles. If you save as PDF from the print dialog, you get PDFs that you can tweak in Illustrator. For thicker outlines and bigger handles, use a smaller scale.

Or do you need the usual font editor UI, too?
Then put this line in the macro window and press Run:
Glyphs.currentDocument.windowController().window().print_(None)
(save PDF from the print dialog again)

Kent Lew

Along similar lines, you can get a PDF of the contents of the current glyph window from RoboFont, which is then editable in Illustrator, via the following code :

from mojo.UI import *
from robofab.interface.all.dialogs import PutFile

f = CurrentFont()
path = PutFile("Save File As . . .")

GlyphWindowToPDF(path)

[but not the editor UI elements]

Thomas Schostok

You could also just take a screenshot and resample the screenshot to the desired resolution (3000 px or whatever) with the option "Nearest Neighbor (preserve hard edges)" in Photoshop.
In the end you have some pixelated screenshot that looks like original screenshots, that are, well, pixelated. It looks original without the need of changing anything like the stroke line.

Dave Crossland

https://github.com/fontforge/fontforge/issues/1082#issuecomment-31645785

Thomas Phinney

Thanks all! Several useful ideas. I need to do whatever it is tonight.... The article is late in the process, and the images got kicked back by the layout team.

Dave Crossland