Making Software: How to make a font.
Let's get this out of the way - I'm not a type designer. I've never made a typeface, it's way too much work. And this is coming from a guy writing a hundred thousand words about software. On the face of it, a font is just a collection of vectors for each character and making a font is just the process of painstakingly drawing those vectors. But creating the actual glyphs is sort of the easy part, there's so much more to consider when you have to make those individual characters work with each other, at different sizes, cases and weights. ╌╌╌╌ Type designers are very sensitive about terminology so let's spend some time getting the lay of the land. In practice, people use the terms font and typeface interchangeably but a typeface29 is the family - Garamond, in all its weights and styles - and a font11 is a specific instance: Garamond Roman at 12pt, or Garamond Bold Italic. From a technical perspective, a font file is a structured database made up of tables. Only one of the tables in this