High Logic Programs: Maintype and Font Creator Program
High Logic is a software firm from the Netherlands specialised in font software. They offer two programs, the Font Creator Program, which at the moment is at its fifth version, and a new font management program called MainType. I have recently tried both programs and here are my impressions.
Maintype
While there are quite a few font management programs around, most of them have become obsolete because of their lack of support for the OpenType font format, the new standard for font files. That's where MainType really excels, with many features addressing this particular font format. I´ve been using Font Navigator for years (a very nice and ultra-fast font manager bundled with CorelDraw since its version 7), but recently it was a bit frustrating to keep on managing and examining fonts with it, due to its lack of support for OpenType extended features. Sure, you could complement your past font manager with the simple Character Map utility (included with any default Windows XP install), but it´s better to have it all in a single application. And certainly, MainType is the single application you need for this.
When you explore a folder with fonts, MainType loads the whole contents of the folder and displays not only the list of included fonts, but a preview of the font files included. In a single screen you have everything at hand. Browsing your font collection is as simple and pleasurable as it may get. Whenever you need to spot a good font or dingbat for a project, or when you want to organize the newest fonts you have just purchased or downloaded, MainType makes it a breeze. In a single screen you have near at hand the whole details of the font files, a customizable text preview, the different OpenType character blocks, a large detail of the selected character, the font sets (or groups), and all the rest of features. Everything is prettily displayed and accessible.
Main Type main window, with tabs and menu items to access all of its funcionality.
MainType offers a straightforward and easy-to-use interface to help you maintain your fonts. The list of features of the program is impressive, including everything you expect from a good font management program: extensive format support (TrueType, OpenType, Postscript Type 1, Vector and Raster fonts), file operations (Move, copy, rename and delete fonts), one-click load/unload, install/uninstall, preview fonts in any folder or drive, customizable sample sheets, filter and sort functionality, organising fonts in sets... with the addition of Unicode-related functionality. For your convenience the character map shows all characters grouped in Unicode blocks. Print (along with print preview) results in outstanding reports.
One quick look at the program interface reveals the usual panes in most advanced font managers, but here you will find some particularly good enhancements.
The groups pane helps you quickly organize your font collection. Groups are a very convenient way of organising your collection. As we explain in our article about Font Management, a group contains a list of typefaces that you wish to keep together for some reason: because you use them in a single project, because they all share the same style or look, because they are created by the same designer, or whatever reason you could think of. In MainType you access the Groups sub-pane in the top left fonts pane, then you operate with these sets as a whole or accessing their individual fonts. Adding fonts to a given group is just a matter of selecting them either from your active fonts sub-pane or browsing to the folder containing them, then right-click and choose Add to group.
You don't like the placement of any of these panes? Just drag it wherever you prefer to have it! Do you want to have bigger space for some of the panes and get rid of some others? Just click the "x" icon and you zap it and it no longer gets in the way! It’s a seriously usable single-window interface, but highly customizable and flexible for any user's personal preferences.
If you want to create a printed specimen book with your font collection you have a variety of printout options. You can print individual fonts, groups or any selection in different kinds of sheets: a font per sheet with detailed information, character maps, font listing of compact font listings. In addition, the export wizard is able to output font information to clipboard, text and html.
MainType includes a comprehensive PDF manual, plus the usual program help available directly from the toolbar. Support is also available in the Forum website, with a growing community of users. Visit the developer web site (www.high-logic.com) to download a tryout version of the program. It will work under Windows 95, 98, Me, NT 4.0, 2000, XP or 2003. The registration price for MainType (you register the same trial copy you downloaded, to make things easier for you) is US$40.00.
Font Creator Program
FontCreator is a program to well, create fonts. Developed by High Logic Company from The Netherlands, it has reached its fifth version and is a solid application providing a combination of basic tools to easily edit and create typefaces, and powerful wizards and tools to tweak your fonts to the highest quality standard. You can open and modify or create your own TrueType and OpenType fonts. In this sense far more advanced than the beloved Fontographer, the program that fired up the digital font revolution. The development of Fontographer stopped ten years ago, and only recently with the acquisition by Fontlab there seems to be plans to update it. Of course, Fontlab offers an incredible range of font editing options, including advanced OpenType treatment, but it may be overwhelming for most designers who want to design only some basic dingbat or font. Its nearly 800-page heavy manual shows clearly its complexity. On the other hand, Font Creator offers a solid and basic set of features to create, test and tweak fonts in TrueType format, with OpenType extensions like extended character sets.
This program is ideal as an introductory tool for type design. It´s unexpensive and yet provides a quick and reliable system to update existing fonts, customizing fonts for specific uses or even creating a complete font from scratch. There are two versions: the standard version provides a basic toolkit to edit and customize fonts or create new ones, and it can be used by office-oriented users and designers who don't wish to spend too much time learning other complicated programs. The professional version provides more advanced tools and some excellent batch utilities, effects and timesavers, and is more indicated for designers who plan to create fonts more seriously.
Editing an existing font is dead simple and intuitive. You just double-click a character to edit it; once you're done with it, close the glyph and the program will save it. You can add missing characters, as the euro symbol or your own signature, to a font you use regularly. Then it's just a matter of going to File > Save.
The Font Creator Program makes it easy to edit fonts and create new ones.
Creating a new font is very intuitive too, thanks to the import image dialog. Scan your own handwriting, for example, following the guidelines provided in the program help, and go to tools > import image. A dialog will appear letting you choose the parameters to auto-trace the image and generate the glyph. If you copy the image and paste it to an open character slot, the program will perform this autotracing in the background and insert the autotraced outline. You must repeat this process to fill your font.
The autotrace options let you optimize the process of creating new glyphs from an existing scan or image.
You must be aware that whenever you have to typeset or write non-english texts, in many cases you need accented characters and other special characters. Of course, those characters must be included in your font file if you wish to use them. The usual way to create, for example, an accented A, is taking the existing A glyph and reference it for the new accented characters. Then, you may use another reference to a separate existing character, for example, the grave (`) character. This is the usual way font designers complete the character sets, making the font usable for users who write in languages other than english. Again, Font Creator has excellent tools to manage composite characters. In the character table, these are identified by a different colour and a message in the status bar. To create a composite, you just need to open the Glyph overview window, then choose Insert>Characters: you will be offered a character table to choose the character(s) you want to reference. There is a very powerful utility, in the Professional version only, called Complete Composites. When invoked, this feature will add composite glyph members to your glyphs. To use this powerful feature, select a glyph, or a range of glyphs, right-click and select Complete Composites. The selected glyphs will be composed using data in CompositeData.xml, which is read when Font Creator first uses the feature. This feature works with over a thousand glyphs that are defined in this file. As soon as your composites are in place, you can easily examine which glyphs make up each letter, simply viewing the Properties of each character.
You can easily check the composite characters in a given font and create automatically the whole range of composites for a multilingual font.
When you have finished adding the necessary characters, be it simple or composite, you need to tweak the spacing and perform other important metrics operations. Font Creator provides excellent Auto-spacing and Auto-kerning tools, so you won't have to care much about it if you just follow the indications of the wizards included.
As soon as your font is ready (or you think so), you can use the Test and Validate wizards to be sure there are no issues with your font file and you can safely use, distribute or sell it.
Font Creator provides more advanced tools for the experienced users, such as advanced validation features, Edit and correct font names and mappings, and Transform individual glyphs or an entire font (e.g. to make a bold version). Other effects incluce thin, hollow, and random point movement. This last effect is ideal to create "weathered" effects in a font, mimmicking worn lead type and other vintage font looks.
Font Creator program includes some powerful effects and wizards that can be applied to a single glyph, to a group of glyphs or even to the whole font file.
The Font Creator Program includes a comprehensive PDF manual, plus the usual program help available directly from the toolbar. Support is also available in the Forum website, with a growing community of users. Visit the developer web site (www.high-logic.com) to download a tryout version of the program. The Home Edition costs $65.00(US) and the Professional Edition costs $99.00(US). In order to make things easier for you, when you have purchased your user licence, you register the same trial copy you downloaded, so there is no need to unistall the tryout and install the definitive software.
