Who said that? Not me, reread my message. Mac means "boss" or "amateur", and PC means mechanics. Nowadays. Manufacturers create those boring distinctions about tools, I don't. Who should care about tools, prior to even imagine what to do with them? Is this the right section to post my question?

THANKS Koelekat.. but is that REALLY what you call having shares here, showing the toolbox link!?
No sweat guys, I am a Mac user so Font creator I can't use (sounds nice tho,too bad)
Trying to make a choice of a nice smiley to end up my post with... damn... plenty of them, but not the funniest of them all, the always missing one, well I'll have a share too and publish one of my own, I post it as my profile pix.

Oh, and before you ban me, check the meaning of the word "ostracism".

Here is what I finally did...

I copied-pasted my illustrator glyphs with no outline in Fontographer... there I expanded a very small stroke, removed overlap, aligned to the grid (only a slight reajustment happened) and then changed weight to make five different ones. Not absolutely perfect, but good looking for the eye (ultimate judge I reckon) and for what I do with it. Thanks to all for you help.

I still haven't seen the possibility to actually display the grid anywhere.

also doing a lot of preparation hand sketchings, I still wonder how and with which app preferably, to import those as template for a reasonably accurate result, to trace glyphs from them.

Many thanks to you all. Fontforge looks great but sounds like a pain in the neck to install for me, open source I reckon, my skills are mostly limited to pure graphic concerns, I am a poor mechanician, even if my grandfather conducted steam locomotives in France during ww2, head out of the cabin to check the signals red or green, smoke and bits of grit hitting his face. Back home, my grandmother always had to take the bits off his eyeballs using a platine thread. Appart from being used as a sample text, this has nothing to do with the topic!

I am not at all willing to have my characters fitting the exact illustrator design I made, but fit their original source (a principle), trying not to spend too much time on becoming a font designer, which is not my ambition. I can't help being a dilettante, reason why your competences are of great help to me.

At that point, considering my signs are regular spiderlegs extracted from an original grid I built up, I'd rather go back to the root and design from the editor grid itself.

Can I see it and plant my nodes directly on it? and what will happen if I try to make different weights?

Ok, trains run on railways, I have to live with such destinations as train stations in mind, that simple!

At least can I use my illustrator shape on a layer and try to adapt the integer to it, or is there better options??

Logic is a bit at stake here; lets say I draw a christian cross in Illustrator, put it in an oblique on the tip of one lower angle -- I copy paste it, the font editor slightly alters the angles to fit its grid. Those mistakes due to the very own logic of the editor, become mine, and the font editor consider them like non-mistakes! I guess I argue like an unmachine.

Speaking serioulsy, tell me again if I an wrong, I suppose what makes signs assigned to keyboards so different and needing such complex editors, is the fact that those fonts have to fit so many different configurations, computers, softs, printers, etc... I can actually make my christian cross in Illustrator with a very light knowledge of mathematics; font editors require a mecanician's skill.

Now lets put it this way: the font I'm building up is for private use only. If I ever publish or print documents with that font, that will be as PDF. Any straight forward solution to assign my shapes to the keyboard? If you were me, what would you do?

THANKS guys, for the very helpful explaination about the grid. The "align to the grid" function is good to know.

i do get a much better result now, included my illustrator models were maybe a bit too big (about A4) I scale them down and all in all the final aspect is "acceptable". I suppose obtaining really accurate designs would mean doing it all inside the font editor and having already worked a lot on it in Illustrator, and the font itself being mere stems, I won't go so much into the editor this time.

Frankly, having inspected modern fonts here and there, I think the editors are very problematic to use and most of those fonts, if correct for small weight, look dreadfull once enlarged. I don't see how shapes can ever go perfectly right with that grid system, tell me if i am wrong. Also having been taught how to hand draw letters during my studies in Paris, I wonder why most of the redesigned classic fonts are round tipped... weird. A lot to be done I reckon, when time allows!

And not the place to discuss those aspects anyway.

Thanks again for your great help and keep up the good work.

Graphic regards.

MC

Perfect vectors in Illustrator
http://gigabrother.online.fr/PerfectOriginalDesignInIllustrator.jpg

Perfect display in fontographer
http://gigabrother.online.fr/PerfectDisplayInFontog.jpg

Perfect EPS from Fontographer
http://gigabrother.online.fr/PerfectEPSFromFontog.jpg

Disastrous result with the generated font!
http://gigabrother.online.fr/TrashGeneratedFont.jpg

Thanks Claudeserieux for taking the time to review my question, but my trouble is not at all while copying-pasting from Illustrator, which works fine, only when generating my font. Should it result from settings in the file format itself, or settings of the apps?

My intuition was it involved settings on the "generating file" menu (!?)

Still trying everything, I could not make it out so far :(

Hi there,

Both in fontographer and FontLab, my font greatly display -- but once generated, the points are not accuratly matching their position! It may not be that annoying on heavy weights, but on ultralight it is a drag not to have the generated font matching the exact positions. Stems just go a bit larger or thiner here and there and I've tried every possible generating for the same disappointing result and...

here I am on da font, hoping this topic is not running already for a thousand dummies of my kind!!!

I should add I work on a mac with OSX 10.6, the same problem happens with fontographer 4 and 5, and that I copy_paste my characters from Illustrator, which works greatly, until I generate my font...

Truly it is not such big gaps that happen, but I don't see the point in producing a font not matching perfectly the result I have in Illustrator.

Thank you all guys for the great job you are doing, and for the time you may spend on helping me.

Graphic regards.