I'm wondering if people use Illustrator to design the actual font-glyph, and use Illustrator until the glyph is fully developed, positioned, etc.. Then only once the glyph is basically done do you go into FontLab and copy-paste your Illustrator glyph and boom it fits into the grid automatically. The only reason you use FontLab is to organize your glyphs into the font file... You don't use FontLab to do the actual drawing and resizing of the glyphs, because it seems to primitive to do anything substantial.
The reason I'm asking is because I would like to scale all of my glyphs in the font to be the same width and height and be centered according to the guides. The only option I see in FontLab is to select multiple glyphs in the font view, then go to the Transform Panel and specify a percentage width. But that is far too crude. I don't know what percentage width to change each glyph!!! The glyphs are each different sizes and in different places in the glyph area, so I don't know what sort of math I would need to bring out to figure this out, but it seems crude and hard.
Instead, I would like to say basically: "take the farthest points on the left, and put them 20pt to the right of 0. Take the farthest points to the right and put them 20pt to the left of the right edge of the guides. etc.." Basically, tell them the constraints I would like the font glyphs to all have, and then boom, it dynamically adjusts each individual glyph to be 20pt to the left and right edge, scaled appropriately.
This seems like something that might be possible in Illustrator, but I am sad to find that it doesn't seem possible to do this in FontLab. It seems FontLab tried to recreate some of Illustrators stuff, but are miles and miles behind the technology, so it's almost worthless to use FontLab as a vector editor (let alone one at scale).
So my question is, (1) Can FontLab actually do this? And (2) Is it better to do all the "vector work" in Illustrator, and only when you are close to "feature complete" for the glyphs do you move them into FontLab for output to the font file. I would like to know if this is the better workflow. Also, it would help a lot if you knew some resources to look at to get better at making the font glyphs and doing batch operations like this. Seems like I should be doing this in Illustrator, but even then I'm not sure it's possible.
Thank you.
- https://font.is/fontlab-using-illustrator-to-draw-fonts-for-importing-into-fontlab/
- https://design.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-create-a-font-in-adobe-illustrator--cms-25921
- https://www.schoolofmotion.com/blog/custom-font-illustrator-fontforge
- https://creativepro.com/how-to-build-font-adobe-illustrator/
- https://coursetro.com/posts/code/145/Learn-How-to-Make-a-Font-(Written-&-Video-Tutorial)
- https://creativemarket.com/blog/create-your-own-hand-lettered-fonts-in-minutes-with-fontself
- https://design.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-create-your-own-font--cms-29019
- https://www.sitepoint.com/create-an-icon-font-illustrator-icomoon/
- https://blog.storyblocks.com/image-tutorials/use-adobe-illustrator-artboards/
None of these are that detailed.
