Step 5
My computer sucks. It crashes if I leave two applications running at the same time for more than five minutes. So I'm moving pretty fast at this point, cuz I've gotta copy the letters from Illustrator and paste them into Fontographer real quick before my computer crashes. So I copy a bunch at a time in Illustrator and paste them into Fontographer.
What will happen when letters are copied from Illustrator to Fontographer is the characters
will be sized to fit from the lowest descender (like the bottom of the lowercase y) to the highest
ascender (the top of any capital letter). To get all of your characters to come across the same
size as each other as they move from Illustrator to Fontographer, you'll have to create a dummy
character that represents what this height should be. So I draw a box that's big enough to go
from the top of the capital A to to the base of a lowercase y. Umm.... like this --I>
Now I copy each horizontal row of letters (along with the box that keeps the height of all the characters uniform) in Illustrator and paste 'em into a space in Fontographer. It's kinda goofy, but this is important:
When copying in
illustrator, you
must hold down
the "option" key
as you pull down
"copy" from the
edit menu. The
keyboard shortcut
for copying won't
work, and you
must hold down
the "option" key
as you copy.
Keeping Illustrator
open, open up
Fontographer, too.
Go under "File" and select "New Font." You'll get a window like the above.
Select the "A" box and pull down "paste" from the edit menu. Once again, you might have problems if you use the keyboard shortcut to paste, so remember to use the pull-down menu.
So now I've pasted the characters A-J into the A box. Next I paste K through T into the K box. And repeat with each line of letters until I've gotten everything from Illustrator into Fontographer so I can quit Illustrator before my computer crashes.
