Font Built, Transparency Issues. HELP!
Hi everyone. I'm fairly new to the world of typography and font-creation (as in just started Sunday). I have been looking for months for a way to take an old .bmp font I had that I used on an old Windows machine and turn it into a .ttf for my Mac. I finally found a way to do that with FontStruct. The only trouble is that now my font is transparent!! Whenever I type, I get the outline of my font (because the font is an old Nintendo style font, the blocks I used in FontStruct only created the outer layer). I desperately need a way to take this now .ttf and make it whole! I've been looking all over the place, but programs cost so much money and I'm not sure the free ones can do what I need. If anyone has any help, I'd greatly appreciate it as I need this font for a graphics project and sadly, it being transparent just wont do!
2.Mar.2010 6.18pm
.ttf files can only be one color so far at I know, so you can't have both black and white which it soulds like you need. Can you fill in the letters in Fontstruct so that they are all black, and then do some kind of outlining with a graphics program to the typed text?
2.Mar.2010 6.27pm
I thought about that, but then the letters would be all black, and I need them to be all white. It's a perplexing situation I've gotten myself into. I attempted to fill them in using photoshop, but since they're transparent, there's no middle to fill in and it only changes the color of the border. I'm wondering now if anyone knows of a free third party application that might be able to fill them in for me... or if I'm doomed to never get this font just how I need it. Originally I had been cutting and pasting each individual letter to spell anything... and that's far more time consuming than I prefer.
2.Mar.2010 7.15pm
Didn't you paste twice? Two perfectly overlapping vector instructions may cause the glyph to be rendered as 'transparent' or with just a very thin contour.
2.Mar.2010 7.19pm
Paste twice? I'm using my font as a .ttf so that all I have to do is open up the type tool in Photoshop and type using my font, however my font is only an outline, with no filler in the middle. I wanted to have to avoid extracting the font from a seperate image, but I feel like I might not have a choice if I cant find some help.
2.Mar.2010 11.04pm
If I had to make a bitmap font and didn't have professional font software I'd probably recreate it in Fontstruct "manually".
3.Mar.2010 10.38am
I did that. Now the font is transparent. Is there another application out there I can use to get ride of this transparency? I'd like to have more than just an outline of my font. = /
3.Mar.2010 10.50am
You need to make a second font for the "white" parts. Then set the "black" and "white" fonts on top of one another, in layers, and make the "white" font white using the color palette in your graphics or layout program.
3.Mar.2010 10.52am
It'll take some time to recreate the font as a filler for the outline, but that's genius. It's always the simplest solution that is often overlooked. Thank you so much!!
3.Mar.2010 11.18am
It's really the only solution. Outline fonts only allow one color + transparency. The color part is undefined until you use the font in a document and pick a color (default is usually black).
3.Mar.2010 1.24pm
Well I appreciate the feedback. This was my first try at making a font, so now I know better. Again, thank you.