Advanced Font Development Techniques

FontLab’s element model supports ways to develop a drawing while retaining an adjustable construction. Live filters can combine shapes, reshape an outline, or attach details such as corners and serifs. Strokes and brushes build a visible form around a skeleton path, letting you work with its course and thickness as separate design decisions.

Color adds another set of choices: solid fills, gradients, opacity, and the arrangement of colored elements. SVG and bitmap artwork bring their own editing and processing methods. This chapter connects each method to the content it produces, so you can decide what to keep editable and understand whether the resulting artwork is vector or bitmap content.

Live Filters

Develop adjustable constructions that combine, detail, or reshape existing drawings.

Live Filters

Apply and adjust live filters, understand their relationship to source content, and expand or remove a construction.

Boolean Assembly: Fusion, Clipping, and the Fill Tool

Combine elements through Fusion, clipping, and the Fill tool while retaining an editable construction.

Smart Corners and Ink Traps

Add and configure live corner rounding or ink traps, then choose whether to retain, apply, or remove the treatment.

The Glue Filter

Attach an open contour to a body, control the joins, and reuse details such as serifs through Glue.

The Skin Filter

Prepare source glyphs for corner, cap, segment, and dash skins, then apply and adjust their fit.

The Delta Filter

Add local offsets to a shared source, control the filter’s strength, and derive related shapes with Delta.

The Mesh Filter

Deform a drawing through an editable envelope and work within the Mesh filter’s coordinate and construction limits.

Stroke and Brush

Build visible forms around skeleton paths and control their thickness, terminals, and brush behavior.

Designing with Skeletons

Understand how a skeleton path and its stroke or brush settings together produce a visible outline.

Working with Strokes

Configure stroke width, caps, joins, and placement, and choose between simple strokes and live Power Stroke.

Working with Brushes

Draw with a brush, configure its nib and profile, and retain live Power Brush constructions or reusable presets.

The Thickness Tool

Adjust thickness at skeleton nodes and vary local stroke distribution or brush-nib settings.

Designing in Color

Apply color to contour elements and work with SVG or bitmap artwork inside glyphs.

Coloring Contour Elements

Apply solid colors, gradients, stroke color, and opacity, then organize colored elements into glyphs.

Working with Color Images

Work with SVG and bitmap content, process images, and prepare artwork while keeping vector and bitmap output distinct.