Font Friday: Roadgeek Fonts

When I drew up the plans for my daily topic, today was supposed to be Font Friday. That means one font. I decided we should start with a bang and I'll direct you to a bunch of fonts today.

Roadgeek fonts were created to duplicate the fonts used on highway signage. Please read the license agreement carefully as they are not licensed for sign production, commercial logo design or mass publication. As you scroll down the page, you'll find links to download the individual fonts or series. Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the list and find the one labeled Complete. Click this and you can download them all at once. That means you get a total of 27 different fonts. While we're about road sign fonts, let me throw out yet another freebie for today. There is a font created by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources that contains a number of recreation symbols.

Whew, that's 28 fonts today. That should keep all of the font fanatics out there satisfied until next Friday.

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Great Artwork for use in CorelDRAW, Adobe Illustrator and more

I'm always looking around for new sources of material for use in CorelDRAW and other graphics software. That recently led me to discover Go Media's Arsenal Professional Design Weaponry.

You'll find some of the coolest vector artwork you've ever seen. Many of the pieces were created by the Go Media design team for major rock bands, fashion companies and Fortune 500 companies. There are also packages of bitmap textures for backgrounds, fonts and motion graphics.

Of course there are also some cool freebies to download. There is no doubt you'll find something that you can use in your projects. You'll probably find many things you want!

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Designing Fonts in CorelDRAW

I've always been very interested in fonts. Each one is new and different. Some are awesome, some are just plain awful. This love of fonts led me to work for a font foundry back in the early 90s. That company had all kinds of software tools for creating fonts. And even while the digitizers at the foundry were using Macs to digitize fonts, I was playing around with creating some in CorelDRAW.

Even back in early versions of CorelDRAW it was possible to create your own fonts. The key is knowing where CorelDRAW is best used and where it should not be used.

Today someone posted a nice story about a font designer who is using CorelDRAW to create some really cool fonts. They are retro, yet hip. He didn't go into all the technical details about how he uses CorelDRAW so I'll have to try and fill in the blanks with my best guess. This guess is based on the process I use to create fonts with CorelDRAW. For those who want to read more about it, there is a chapter in my CorelDRAW X3 Unleashed and CorelDRAW X4 Unleashed books about it.

Set up a template in CorelDRAW with a baseline, cap height, x-height, descender line and any other guidelines you might need. Design each character for your font. That is probably the longest step in the process as a quality font has over 200 characters and possible more. Once you have all the characters drawn, export them one by one to a font file. CorelDRAW can export to either TTF or PFB files.

Where CorelDRAW is severely lacking is the technical aspects of the font. The spacing is creates is OK. It does not include any kerning data and it does not hint the font. Hinting makes a font look good at smaller sizes or on lower resolution devices. Because of this, I'll take the font I export from CorelDRAW and import it into FontLab. FontLab makes it easy to adjust the font's metrics and to add kerning data. The process can be completely automated or you can manually adjust to your heart's content. When it saves a font, it will include very good quality hinting. Yes, you can draw the font in FontLab, but I find it much easier to use the tools in CorelDRAW. If you are looking for a lower-priced editor, the folks at FontLab also offer TypeTool.

All in all, I find that CorelDRAW is a great tool for designing fonts as long as you know its limitations. Even if you don't want to design an entire font, it is still handy for doing a few special characters for a design project or for a client. Just one more thing that CorelDRAW can create!

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Design Studio Packages Loaded with Apparel Templates

There are many CorelDRAW users creating graphics for apparel. Two new packages have been released that are loaded with high-quality graphics to be used for apparel. Design Studio packages can be bought individually or get both volumes for a discounted price. They are loaded with graphics, templates, fonts, distress overlays and a full color book loaded with examples.

This is a great collection for anyone doing screen printer, garment printing, embroidery and more. And for those using Decostudio, it gives you the multi-decoration artwork that will really show off the capabilities of Decostudio.

Check out the sample images from this collection and you'll find that it can bring even more creativity to the products you are creating.

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CorelDRAW Unleashed Font Substitution Update

If you read the Letters to the Editor in the April/May issue of CorelDRAW Unleashed magazine, you know that some readers are having a problem seeing the correct font when reading the magazine. Thanks to the letter appearing in the magazine, several readers have written me with suggestions. We still don't have a complete answer for the problem, but we've certainly discovered why it happens for some users.

The main font used for body text of the magazine is Georgia. It is a font supplied with most all recent versions of Windows, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer and more. So, it is a font that most users should have on their systems.

Where things get strange is when users don't have Georgia on their systems. Those are the users who are having the weird font substitution problems. This shouldn't matter as the Georgia font is supposed to be embedded into the magazine. I had a long talk with the fine folks at Ascender Corporation, who created the Georgia font, and we discovered that a weird conversion problem was causing only the regular weight of Georgia to not embed into the PDF properly.

We will create a new PDF of the April issue that solves this problem, though it may be a few days before it is available for download. In the meantime, there are several ways to read the magazine without having this problem. First, make sure you have the Georgia font installed and that Advanced | Use Local Fonts is checked in Adobe Reader. Second, use FoxIt Reader to read the magazine as it substitutes a font that is much more readable for Georgia.

Now for the solution that we'll have to implement when we re-publish the issue. It seems the problem is a fairly obscure setting in Corel products. No, Corel didn't do anything wrong, it is just a setting that needs to be changed to avoid this issue. On the Objects tab of the Publish to PDF Settings dialog box, the default setting is to Convert TrueType to Type 1 fonts. Georgia is a TrueType font. When this setting is unchecked, the problem goes away.

You can't believe how glad I am to discover the solution to this problem. It took discussions with experts in a wide variety of software to stumble upon the problem. While many users would have called this a bug, it was truly user error all along.

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CorelDRAW X4 Font List

One of the questions that always arises with new versions goes something like "so what fonts are included?"

As a writer, I often get my hands on the discs a little before the public and I do have a copy of the DVD for CorelDRAW X4 in my hot little hands. Overall there are 1191 font files though 96 fonts are duplicated. That leaves 1095 fonts if my math is correct. That number may still be off by a little bit as I haven't actually counted all of them.

The fonts of biggest interest to engravers will be the 10 single line fonts that make their debut in CorelDRAW X4. I'll let you look at the full font list and decide for yourself which fonts are new to you.

Did I mention that the installer will automatically copy (not install) the fonts to a folder you specify on the hard drive? It will also copy clip art, photos and other extra content on the DVD. All in all, there are some great things to like about the extras included with this release.

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