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