Lessons of a weekend font builder

Operations at Stikmanz Intergalactic HQ this past weekend centered on font development. After setting up bounding boxes with baselines and center lines, I imported the characters created for Dvarsh Bold, and distributed them into rough position in the boxes. Even before fixing final position relative to baseline and center lines, it was clear that about a dozen glyphs needed refinement. About half of those were numerals. One was a vowel.

The next step is to fix position of each glyph within its bounding box, and then import the glyph/box units into FontLab. At that point I’ll be able to determine what two-character ligatures are needed. Ligatures in place will reveal how many slots remain for Dvarsh special characters and symbols. More important than ligatures or symbols, however, is the task of working out how the glyphs will set relative to each other in actual use, and building those instructions into the font. Discovering what those instructions will be is lesson for another day.