I am now at the point where I am ready to start creating accents and accented characters for Jetsonville. These characters are being created in Adobe Illustrator and then imported into FontSelf to create an actual OpenType-format font.
So far I have been building every character in its own Illustrator file and then importing the outline into FontSelf. I have already created several alternate characters, such as the o-e ligature, by duplicating the Illustrator file for lowercase o, opening the Illustrator file for lowercase e and copying the outline of the character, and then pasting the outline for the e into the duplicated file containing the lowercase o. After adjusting the two letter outlines so that they fit nicely, I saved the duplicated file with a new name and imported the o-e ligature into FontSelf.
Yesterday morning, as I contemplated starting to make the 56 accented uppercase and lowercase characters that the font needs, I had a “blinding flash of the obvious” concerning this process: There is no need to duplicate and rename all these files. I can simply add the accents to the existing letter files as new layers. Then I turn layers on and off to create the outlines I need and import the outlines into FontSelf.
Well, duh. Of course that would be simpler. This also means that if I fine-tune the outline of the base character, I only have to make the change once, and then turn layers on and off to import all the new character outlines into FontSelf. If I made the accented characters the way I was formerly planning to, I would have to open each file for each accented character and apply the same changes I applied to the base character. That would be a lot more work than using layers.
I could wonder why it took me so long to figure this out, but I would rather be grateful that I did figure it out before I started the process of creating all the accented characters.
