Tutorial #2

Navigating to characters.

The font view provides one way of navigating around the characters in a font. Simple scroll around it until you find the character you need and then double click on it to open a window looking at that character.

Typing a character will move to that character.

However some fonts are huge (Chinese, Japanese and Korean fonts have thousands or even tens of thousands of characters) and scrolling around the font view is a an inefficient way of finding your character. View->Goto provides a simple dialog which will allow you to move directly to any character for which you know the name (or encoding). If your font is a Unicode font, then this dialog will also allow you to find characters by block name (ie. Hebrew rather than Aleph).

The simplist way to navigate is just to go to the next or previous character. And View->Next Char and View->Prev Char will do exactly that.

Creating the letter "o" -- consistant directions

In the previous example the bitmap of the letter filled the canvas of the image. And when PfaEdit imported the image it needed to be scaled once in the program. But usually when you create the image of the letter you have some idea of how much white space there should be around it. If your images are exactly one em high then PfaEdit will scale them automatically to be the right size. So in the following examples all the images have exactly the right amount of whitespace around them to fit perfectly in an em.

For the next example double click on the square in the font view that should contain "o", and import "o_Ambrosia.png" into it.
Stages in editing "o"

Notice that the first outline is drawn clockwise and the second counter-clockwise. This change in drawing direction is important. Both PostScript and TrueType require that the outer boundry of a character be drawn in a certain direction (they happen to be oposite from each other, which is a mild annoyance), within PfaEdit all outer boundries must be drawn clockwise, while all inner boundries must be drawn counter-clockwise.

If you fail to alternate directions between outer and inner boundries you may get results like the one on the left . If you fail to draw the outer contour in a clockwise fashion the errors are more subtle, but will generally result in a less pleasing result once the character has been rasterize.

The command Element->Correct Direction will look at each selected contour, figure out whether it qualifies as an outer or inner contour and will reverse the drawing direction when the contour is drawn incorrectly.

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