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Select them both, open the Pathfinder panel, and click the first icon – “Unite”. If you create a shape that consists of two or more overlapping objects, such as this double quote, you need to unite them into a single shape or Fontself Maker will turn them into two glyphs. You can, if you wish, drag multiple shapes in here and rename them one at a time. When the glyph appears in your font, you’ll need to select the marker beneath it and type the key with which you want it associated. Since you’re creating a dingbats font, you need to drag them into the Any Character space at the bottom of the panel. Fontself Maker is designed for making alphabetic fonts, and makes it easy to drag entire upper or lower case alphabets and numbers into the panel to convert them all in one go. Open the Fontself Maker panel, and select your first shape – together with its upper and lower guides. Select the top guide and click its name in the panel, then rename it “capsheight”, then name the bottom one “baseline”. You can do this in Illustrator’s Layers Panel: open the current layer by clicking on the triangle next to its name, and you’ll see all the shapes and guides on that layer. Step 2: Define your guidelinesīefore you import the glyphs into your font, you need to explicitly name the guidelines. More after the jump! Continue reading below↓įree and Premium members see fewer ads! Sign up and log-in today. When making a font of any kind you need to define the baseline and cap height, and you can do this by dragging guidelines down to the locations where you want them. I drew one arrow by making a triangle it was then easy to rotate this to make the arrows pointing in other directions. Since the key purpose of this font was to create arrows, it made sense to start with some arrow shapes. The font was build in Illustrator, using the Fontself Maker plug-in available from.
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And since I was building a font, it made sense to include the other glyphs I need regularly – circles in numbers, keyboard modifiers, social media logos, and a few other symbols for which I’ve previously had to hunt through Zapf Dingbats. It’s a senseless lack of correlation between shortcut and purpose, so I decided to build my own Dingbats font that used U for up, D for down, L for left and R for right. In Wingdings 3, you type T for the left arrow, U for right, P for up and D for down. I used the font Wingdings 3, which contains the arrows I wanted. Some time ago I designed a book in InDesign, in which I wanted the picture captions to have arrows pointing to the corresponding images.
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