Fontlab autotrace ?
Hi all,
I’ve looked through the FL manual but can’t find anything mentioning a autotrace feature, but I was sure that FL had one, am I wrong
I bought a copy of FL’s Scan font but I’ve never been able to get it work. I click the ScanFont icon then click the install button and then accept the license agreement, but then I always get an error window saying - “Installation interrupted - can’t create destination folders’ tree”. I tried contacting FL about this matter but never got a proper response. I’m using a Mac OSX 10.3.9.
If anyone could help with the Scan font problem then I wouldn’t need a autotrace in FL and that would be great.
Rr.
13.Aug.2007 4.30pm
In Fontlab, paste the bitmap that you want to trace into the glyph, it will become that glyphs background. Then use Tools > Background > Trace Pixels or Tools > Background > Trace. You can even add the Background menu to your toolbar and make this a quick button click.
14.Aug.2007 3.39am
I tried doing it with a photoshop esp but it wouldn’t work. How can I get this to work ?
14.Aug.2007 10.01am
Start reading at page 456 of the Fontlab manual. Be aware that everything refers to simple bitmap format images because Fontlab will not process other kinds of images.
14.Aug.2007 12.13pm
I’m using FontLab 5.0.4 on XP. I got it to work by pasting an image from Photoshop directly into FontLab Studio. It showed up as a gray background image. Then I used Tools > Background > Trace. The results were less than spectacular.
Under Tools > Options > Trace Options I made some adjustments and got much better results as far as following the contour. Unfortunately, there were way too many points, and the cleanup was too time consuming.
I didn’t spend much time on it, so there is probably a way to tweak it to get even better results, but drawing it manually seems like the best way to ensure a quality result.
14.Aug.2007 8.13pm
If I remember rightly, Adam Twardoch said something about ScanFont not working properly with FontLab Studio, and this being fixed in the next upgrade. You may find something on the FontLab sites, or maybe Adam will come on and clear this up.
17.Aug.2007 1.35pm
You may find BitFonter 3 (which is a sort of ScanFont on steroids) giving the best results when it comes to autotracing. I agree that the tracing in FontLab Studio may be suboptimal. One trick is to convert your image to black-and-white and try different pixel sizes. In FontLab Studio, more does not always mean better. The autotracing of an image that is 800 pixels high may give you better results than of one that is 3000 pixels high.
Adam