Modify Fonts with TypeTool 3

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My new favorite font is Fran Hand.  The font designer, Francis Stephen Lestingi,  has a background in mechanical drawing and it shows in the execution of this font.  A beautiful, clean handwritten font.

fran-hand-original

Unfortunately, as much as I love this font, I hated the capital M.  The designer uses the same stroke for the M and the W, just inverted.  While it works for the W, the M does not read!  In looking at the full character set, I noticed that there is an alternative M and W in the font set buried in the extended characters.  Well, that’s annoying.  But, with a simple cut-n-paste in TypeTool 3, I was able to swap these letters.

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After swapping the capital M, I regenerated the the font and it works perfectly.

fran-hand-modifiedEven if there were not alternate characters, TypeTool 3 allows you to directly alter the paths of each font letter.  It’s just like modifying paths in Illustrator.

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Of course, you can use TypeTool 3 to create brand new fonts.  I have used TypeTool 3 to create italic fonts for existing “regular” fonts as well as convert Truetype and Postscript fonts into OpenType.

If you love fonts, TypeTool 3 is a great program to explore the art of fontography.

 

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