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I've been working on a big Web design project for a client. Within the design is their logo and it has been very difficult for me to give them the exact look they want. The problem was the quality of the original artwork I received. So I set out on a search for the font so that I could recreate the artwork.
The first artwork I got was a vectorized version of the logo. It was the best that could be accomplished with the artwork they had. As we started the search, I asked if they could provide me with a scan of the original artwork. That was supplied to me with the clue that the fonts were named Corsaire Sans X-Bold N and Corsaire Sans Light N. You'll see the original at right. Prior to diving headfirst into the graphics training business, I worked for a font foundry. So this kind of search brought back a lot of memories. The original artwork was in good shape and shows the two fonts we need to match.
I started the search by flipping through a couple of font catalogs of the fonts that I already owned. There were a few that were kind of close, but nothing that truly matched. I checked the name Corsaire and couldn't find any matches for it. So I knew this would be a much tougher search and I brought out the magic software.
The magic software is called Font Expert. You can get details on it at http://www.unleash.com/sd . Font Expert contains a database of over 20,000 fonts. So all you have to do is get a good scan of the original font and plug it into Font Expert. Press the button and you'll be provided with the name.
The image at right shows our original artwork all loaded. You'll also see a character chart at the right with the characters in our logo highlighted. I had already selected each character in the scan and connected it with the correct character in the chart. You can do this with only a single character, but the more you have, the better the results.
Once you have all the characters set up, push the Result button at the bottom of the character chart and you'll be shown all the matching fonts and how closely they match. In my case, there was only one match as shown at left. A rough character chart is shown at the top of the dialog box. Just below that is the percentage of the match, the name of the font and the foundry name in parentheses. Note that my match is only shown as 89%. If I choose different sets of characters, I can get the match up to as high as 95%. Now that I actually have the font, I can tell you that it is a direct match.
To learn more about the foundry, click the Type Foundry button and you'll get the information shown at right. This can come in quite handy if you are planning on buying the font. And this is also where I have a little problem with the data provided. It isn't very accurate. While I don't know for sure, I don't think the foundry that makes this font still exists. Out of curiosity, I looked up the foundry I used to work for. They were sold over seven years ago and yet they are still listed at the old address and phone that I remember so well. So you'll have to take the foundry information with a grain of salt. It would be nice if they were to update this information with the places where you can truly purchase the fonts.
OK, I now know that the font exists and know the name of it. The next step is trying to find someplace that sells it. My experience in the business led me to Precision Type as I knew they carried fonts from a very large number of foundries. They did have the font. Now the problem was that they only sold it in PostScript format for the Mac. I'm a PC user as is my client. There really wasn't much choice so I went ahead and ordered the font. I had the font delivered by e-mail as well as by disk just so I had all the bases covered.
I'm still waiting on the disk, but the e-mail arrived within an hour or two. It contained a compressed file and I was able to decompress it. Unfortunately, that just gave me a program that installs the fonts. Since I don't own a Mac, that didn't do me any good at all. I made a few phone calls and found a friend with a Mac that could install the fonts and then send me the actual font data. Four or five calls later, I had found someone willing to help. On the Mac, fonts come in two separate files, screen fonts and printer fonts. The printer fonts contain the actual data and the screen fonts have bitmaps for the screen and the more important spacing and kerning information.
Next we'll go over the rest of the steps for converting the fonts from Mac format to PC and I'll even tweak them a little bit as the spacing and kerning info wasn't very detailed. One of the most important things I've learned is just how helpful Font Expert can be in finding fonts. As long as you have good artwork and the font exists, you can find it quite easily. In my situation, the easy part was the identification!
Some types of files convert nicely from Mac to PC. Fonts are not one of them. So we needed a special program. The really good news is that there is an excellent program for this distributed as shareware called CrossFont. It is made by Acute Systems and you can download a copy from their Web site at http://www.asy.com. For simple conversions, the free version works fine. You'll only need to register if you want to batch convert large numbers of fonts. While on their Web site, you might also want to look at TransMac. It will allow you to read and write on Mac disks from a PC.
CrossFont doesn't do much, but it does the conversion really well. The dialog at right shows the entire program. We start out by telling it we want to convert from a Mac Type 1 Printer Font (that's a PostScript font). Choosing the encoding can be a bit tricky. I had to try a couple of different times before I found the one that worked right for these fonts. The real key is that Macs and PCs define characters differently. Using Fontographer (discussed later) I was able to see the position of the characters to determine if I'd chosen the correct encoding. For this font, "standard" was our final choice.
Next we needed to choose what files we wanted to output for the PC. I chose a PFB and a PFM, printer and metric files respectively for a PostScript font. Since we started with PostScript, we end with PostScript. CrossFont will not convert between PostScript and TrueType formats. Note that Fontographer (we're getting to it soon) will do that conversion if you so desire.
Lastly we choose the files we're going to convert. First the font file is loaded and then the "screen font" which defines the font metrics on a Mac. Once these are chosen, the desired files are output and the fonts are ready to use.
I could have stopped after converting the fonts. But I wanted to go a step further. In looking at the font data, I noticed that there was no kerning data included.
What is kerning, you ask? Well we'll start with a description of the spacing. Each character is defined to take up a certain width. Characters such as "I" have a very narrow width and a "W" would have a much wider width. The problem is that some characters when placed side by side need to have an adjustment made. Most obvious is the "AV" letter pair. The bottom of the "A" hangs out to the right and the top of the "V" sticks out to the left. So when placed side by side, they leave a rather large white gap. Thus a font can have kerning pairs defined. Software that understands these pairs will then adjust for the spacing between any two defined letters. Most word processors aren't smart enough to use kerning pairs, but illustration and page layout programs will use them.
OK, so now that we understand a kerning pair, how do we go about defining one? You'll need software to do this and the most popular tool for working with fonts is Macromedia's Fontographer. (Editor's Note: Read review of Fontographer and Fontlab) When you open a font, you first will notice that each character is a separate piece of artwork that can be opened and modified. The dialog at left shows the character chart. Double-click on the character you wish to edit and it will open up in a separate window.
Next, let's look at the spacing for both the "A" and the "V" so we can understand the gap that will be left between them. At right are the character windows side by side. The green lines define the left and right sidebearing for the characters. You'll notice that both of the characters do extend beyond the defined edge just a little bit.
So far all the information we've seen was defined in the font. Now we'll get to the kerning which was not present in the font we bought. Again, Fontographer has a window where we can edit this data. With it's kerning window, you simply type in the two characters you want to adjust and it will show them side-by-side as shown at left. Then you can move the rightmost character to adjust the kerning pair. If you look carefully, you'll see the "V" was moved -124.726 towards the "A". This is approximately 1/6th the width of either character. Notice how they look much better after being kerned.
Consider that it isn't uncommon for a well-designed font to have 1000 kerning pairs or more. That means a lot of time and effort. So that you don't have to do it all manually, Fontographer has the process automated. It can automatically space a font. This just means adjusting the width of individual characters. Better yet, it can automatically kern a font. Total time to do both of these operations is maybe 10-15 seconds. Certainly much better than doing it all manually. For those who still want to adjust the data, you can then open the pairs you want and continue tweaking.
This project involved a series of programs to get the final result. First it was FontExpert to identify the fonts, then a friend with a Mac to get the files to us, CrossFont to make the fonts PC friendly and Fontographer to tweak the fonts into shape. Not every project will require all these tools, but they sure are handy to have in your toolbox for when you need them.
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CorelDRAW X6 Font List · CorelDRAW X5 Font List · CorelDRAW X4 Font List · The Terms of Adobe Photoshop and Corel PHOTO-PAINT · CorelDRAW X3 Font List · Cropping and Rotating Files in Corel PHOTO-PAINT · The Magic of Color Styles · CorelDRAW's Find and Replace Wizard · Shorten Your Design Time with Templates · CorelDRAW's Multi-Faceted Eyedropper Tool · CorelDRAW and Special Characters · The Easy Way to Create Calendars in CorelDRAW · The Wide World of Labels in CorelDRAW · Including Variable Data with Print Merge · Resaving, Resizing & Resampling Files in Corel PHOTO-PAINT · Creating Your Own Fonts in CorelDRAW · The Evils of Using JPEG Files · Speeding Up CorelDRAW 11 and Windows XP · Symbols and Imposition · The Easiest Way to Recreate Logos · A Few Guidelines to Follow · Square Corners Can Be Sticky -- Rounding Corners in CorelDRAW · Creating Complex Shapes Easily with CorelDRAW · Identifying the Mystery Font · Two Ways to Create a Split Front Design · Last Word in Font Management · Calibrating Your Printed Colors with a Color Chart · Graphics Computing in 2001 · Hottest R.A.V.E. In Town · Get the Red Out of Eyes · Secrets of Color Management · Dressing Up Your PDF Files · How Adobe Acrobat Can Make Life Simpler · Why You Want PDF in Your Workflow · Converting a Scanned Logo to Vector in CorelDRAW · Designing 360 Degrees · Customizing Your Interface in CorelDRAW 8.0 · Fitting Text to a Path · Creating Cool Graphs Without a Spreadsheet · From CorelDRAW to Macromedia Flash, A Simple Example · Getting Rid of That Darned White Box · Converting a Bitmap Logo to Vector in CorelDRAW · Finding Clipart with ROMCAT
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Serif WebPlus X2
Xara Web Designer 5.0
Xara Xtreme Pro 4.1
Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Professional
Fuji FinePix 2800 Zoom Digital Camera
Procreate KnockOut 2
Hemera Photo Objects Volume I and II
Wildform SWfx
Macromedia Fontographer 4.1 and FontLab 4
Caligari iSpace v1.5
Xara X
Macromedia Fireworks 4
Web Site Design Made Easy
Alien Skin Eye Candy 4000
Swish 1.51
Macromedia Flash 5
Corel KPT 6
Dreamweaver Ultradev
1st Page 2000
Adobe Illustrator 9
Corel KnockOut v1.5
Xara 3D 4
Cool 3D 3
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