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Bonus Chapter 1
Creating Your Own Font

A t some point in your work as a designer, you’ll have the need for a special font:
something you can’t locate online, something that perfectly complements a
drawing, perhaps a typeface that contains a logo you want to distribute to employees
for letterhead stationery.
You can design the characters of your dream font right in CorelDRAW and
export your work as a typeface you and other can use. In this chapter, you learn
how to set up a page layout specifically for creating fonts, create a simple but
interesting typeface, discover some of the secrets to professional font-making,
and create a typeface template you can reuse later. Because a digital typeface’s
characters are simple drawings, this chapter makes it easy to make a logo font for
business. Naturally, some rules for building a font that works correctly are covered
in this chapter, and it’s a good idea to review Chapters 7 and 9 if you’re not totally
comfortable yet with drawing paths and editing them. The payoff, however, is a
new skill, a font unlike anything anyone else has seen on the Web, and a tool you’ve
created from knowing the tools in CorelDRAW.

Type 1 or TrueType?
CorelDRAW can export your font design to Adobe Type 1—one of the oldest file
formats for digital typefaces—and to the TTF file format—TrueType, a font format
shared by Windows and Macintosh users. Which format you choose depends largely
on how skilled you are in file management and how much free space you have on

(continued )

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your hard drive. Type 1, due to its early invention before operating systems were
capable of displaying fonts you print and fonts you see onscreen, is not one, but two
separate files: a PFM and a PFB file. CorelDRAW automatically generates the PostScript
Font Metrics (PFM) file for you should you choose to export to Type 1 (listed as PFB
on the Save File As Type drop-down list in the Export dialog). Windows uses this file
to display fonts onscreen, but the PFB file (PostScript Font Binary) is the one that
actually contains the vector information for the font so it is printable.
As you can imagine, if a PFM file is lost or misplaced, the corresponding PFB file is
pretty useless. This is the primary reason why you might want to choose TrueType as
the file format for your fonts. Similarly, a PFM file without the corresponding PFB lacks
the font outline information: you’re sunk. One of the advantages to writing your font
to TrueType is that the outlines when you type with TrueType are exceptionally smooth.
TrueType uses more nodes in the outline than a similar Type 1 version. And this is also
the disadvantage to writing all your fonts to TrueType format. The more nodes it takes
to describe the outline of a character, the larger the file size: approximately one byte
per node. This amount seems like a trifling, but it eventually adds up. Some symbol
fonts that are more than 200K in TrueType format can be written to less than 100K as
Type 1s. Another consideration is how many nodes on a character does it require to
describe the shape of the character? Type 1 files require that a character has less than
200 nodes; there is no real limit to the number of nodes in a TrueType character.

Basic Setup Rules and a Custom Template

By digital typography convention, characters are set up on a 1,000 by 1,000 unit
grid. The units don’t actually have a label such as inches or centimeters, but to get
a bearing here, 1,000 points is valid and works for making the characters in a font.
The characters you draw won’t fill the entire height of the page, and some can extend
beyond the page below (for descenders in characters such as q and y) and occasionally
to the right of the page for characters such as W. Ultimately, you export each
character using CorelDRAW’s Export dialog box for TrueType and/or Type 1 fonts, and
in this dialog, you can scale your page so characters are exported in their entirety.
The wisest approach to creating a digital font is to set up a custom page size, add
guidelines, and then create new pages for the document as you design the characters
in the typeface. Probably, the hardest part of designing anything is finding a place to
start: begin by creating a custom page and adding guidelines, as shown in this tutorial:

Tutorial   Making a Template for a Digital Typeface

1. Click the New document button on the Standard Bar. In the Create A New
Document dialog, choose Points from the Units drop-down list, and then type
1000 in both the Width and Height fields. Click OK. If you already have a blank
new file open, double-click the Printable page border (or choose Layout | Page
Setup). This displays the Page Setup options menu. Then, uncheck the Apply
Changes To Current Page Only box.

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Bonus Chapter 1  Creating Your Own Font 3

2. It’s probably a good idea to save this custom page size: click the Custom option
on the Property Bar, and then choose Edit This List. Click the Save icon in the
Page Size options dialog, and then give this custom page size a name that is
easy to remember in the future, such as Typography, as shown here. Click
OK, and then click OK in the Options dialog to apply your changes. In the
future, the Typography page size can be accessed from the Page Selector drop-
down list on the Property Bar.

Save

3. A very good question to ask now is, “So how large should the upper- and
lowercase letters be?” A good answer is to use a font installed on your system
to size up your own font’s measurements, to type an upper and lowercase letter
from, say Arial, on the page, make it the final size, and then drag guidelines
from the Rulers for your own character-building. With the Text Tool, click the
cursor to make an insertion point as close as possible to the bottom-left corner
of the page, then type Aa.
4. With the Pick Tool, select the text, and then type 1000 in the Points field on
the Property Bar; press enter to apply the value.
5. With the Pick Tool, use your mouse wheel to zoom very close to the lower-left
corner of the page and then click-drag the Artistic Text so it touches the lower-
left corner exactly.

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6. From the rulers, drag guidelines so they touch the top of the capital A, the left
edge of the capital A, the bottom of the capital A (this is the baseline of the
font), and the top of the lowercase a. See Figure 1. You’re not done with the
guidelines, nor are you finished with the “stand-in” text on the page, but you
do have a good working template for designing your own font now.
7. Choose File | Save As Template. Save the document in CorelDRAW’s CDT file
format; keep it open for further refinements.

Figure 1  Create a custom size page and apply special units for the rulers to
make a document suitable for building digital typefaces.

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Bonus Chapter 1  Creating Your Own Font 5

You’ll notice something funny going on right now: although you specified 1,000-
point text and the page is set up to 1,000 points in height for the imaginary font grid,
the guideline you dragged to the top of the capital A shows that this character is only
716 points. This discrepancy is for two reasons:

•• The gap from the top of the letter to the top of the page is for descenders of letters
from the line above when you type with the font.
•• The 1,000-point grid is only a reference that designers work against. Some font
capital letters are taller and some are shorter, an artistic call for the font’s creator
to make.

Refining and Resaving the Template

There are two more guidelines that the template requires, and although in theory you
are finished with the Arial font in the current template, it would be nice to hang on to
it for reference as a custom, user-created guide. First, to create a complete typeface,
you need a guideline for where a descender (in gs, ys, and qs) should end, and a good
typeface should also contain a hyphen and an em dash: their positions are easy to
determine based on the current font on the page.
Follow these steps to finish off the template so you can get down to drawing
characters for your font:

Tutorial   Creating more Guidelines

1. With the Artistic Text selected with the Pick Tool, press ctrl+c and then ctrl+v
to copy and paste the text in exact alignment with the original text.
2. With the Text Tool, highlight both characters of the duplicate text and then
type g, then type a hyphen (-).
3. With the Pick Tool and the text selected, apply a color other than black so you
can see what you’re doing; red is good.
4. Drag a guideline from the horizontal ruler to the point where the descender of
the g ends.

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5. Drag a guideline to the bottom of the hyphen. Choose Window | Dockers |

Object Manager for your next move. Your screen should look like the illustration
shown here.

6. Click-drag the Artistic Text titles, one at a time, to a position on the Object
Manager directly below the Master Guides layer, as shown here. By doing this,
you’ll have the characters you typed as a visual guide on all the pages you
create for the different characters in your font.
7. Lock the Master Guides Layer from editing (and accidentally moving the guide
characters) by clicking its pencil icon.

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Lock editing of Guides layer

8. Save the document again as a template (File | Save As Template), overwriting

this file as it existed earlier.

Drawing a Centerline, Not an Outline

The only real qualifier for characters you design for a digital font is that the shape
must be one single shape, vector in format. This means as part of the font creation
routine, you use the Shaping operations to combine several objects into a single one.
But that’s about it: typefaces don’t use fancy fills; a digital typeface just needs outline
(path) information for each character.
You can take three different approaches to drawing the characters that make up
a typeface:

•• If you’re handy with a felt-tip pen and own a scanner, you could bring the bitmap
images into CorelDRAW and then use QuickTRACE to auto-trace every character.
Using this approach, as shown in Figure 2, often leads to a natural style for the
typeface characters, with few or no irregularities. Routinely, you need to manually
edit the result of the tracing to eliminate superfluous nodes and make other minor
consistency corrections. Alternatively, you could bring your scanned image in,
lock it on a layer, create a new layer, and then manually trace over the characters
you physically drew. This takes more time but adds consistency as you draw.

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Figure 2  Corel QuickTRACE is available with CorelDRAW for tracing bitmap

characters to vector format.

•• You can draw each character by hand. This approach often leads to noticeable
inconsistencies between character stem widths—the strokes that make up a
character are called stems—and even consistency within a single character’s parts.
This process is time-consuming, and you can’t reuse the basic structure of each
character, as you can by defining centerlines for the stems of each character and
then giving the stems different properties.
•• You can make centerlines for characters and then apply outline properties. This
is the way to go for speed, stem consistency, and reusability of your character
designs, and it’s the approach shown in this chapter. Here’s the idea: you draw
a “skeleton” of a capital A—for example, a teepee shape with a crossbar—so you
have two paths, three maximum. You can now apply a wide outline to the paths
and even put a round line cap on the strokes. Then at some point you choose
Arrange | Convert Outline To Object on a copy of your paths, and before you
know it, you have a character whose stem widths are completely consistent. After
you use the Weld operation on the paths, the result shape qualifies for export
as a TrueType character. Better still is the fact that you can apply an Artistic
Media stroke to your capital A, and then later use the Break Artistic Media Group
Apart (ctrl+k) command. CorelDRAW saves your original paths, and with a
little refining, the Artistic Media object becomes an elegant, intricate character
perfect for exporting to a font. In the illustration here, you can see examples of
a manually drawn character, a character made by increasing the outline width
and then converting it to an object, and then at right, a character made with a
centerline and Artistic Media then applied.

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Just drawing Centerline with wide Centerline with

outline and rounded caps Artistic Media applied

Professional Fonts
It’s beyond the scope of this book to describe how commercial professional fonts are
created, not because CorelDRAW doesn’t have the tools, but because typography is
an art unto itself and requires many years of developing the skill and knowledge to
produce such contemporary classics as Garamond, commonly accredited to Tony Stan
in the 1970s. The typeface you’re reading in this book has serifs (the small extensions
to the stroke stems on each character) and Roman style typefaces have thick and thin
stems that need to be carefully calculated for character consistency and legibility at
small point sizes. Therefore, creating a commercial typeface you could, for example,
sell for $45, is not the point of this chapter. You need both an artist’s skills in
CorelDRAW and a typographer’s skills to make the big bucks. However, you can indeed
make interesting fonts for personal and in-house use, symbol fonts, and this chapter is
intended as a guide on how to make a basic typeface and how to export the characters
to TrueType file format.

Using Artistic Media on a Centerline for Characters

Artistic Media Pens can be used by click-dragging on a page with the tool, or the
media that surrounds any path can be applied at any time by using the Artistic Media
docker. Artistic Media presents a wonderful opportunity to make elegant characters
from a “skeleton” path, and it’s also a great time-saver, as you’ll soon see. To qualify
as a bonafide TrueType and Type 1 character in a digital font, Artistic Media strokes
need to be simplified before you export them: digital fonts must consist of only paths
(usually closed paths) to indicate the shape of a character, while the space outside the
path is empty space (the inside of the letter o, for example). Artistic Media strokes,
at least most of the presets that ship with CorelDRAW, can consist of several objects;
therefore, an Artistic Media character needs to become a single object before you can
export it. But let’s tackle first things first.

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Basically, no one but you can tell you what your own typeface’s characters should
look like; in English-speaking countries, you’re probably best off with a capital A that
looks like two strokes converging at the top with a crossbar somewhere in the center—
you get the idea. Your best working tool is probably the Bézier Pen Tool because it
handles both straight strokes and curves, and you can use the Arial font on the Master
Guides layer to determine a centerline for your font creation, just to get you started.
A centerline is necessary to provide a control curve upon which you hang Artistic
Media strokes. It’s much easier and provides character consistency to first make a
centerline for a character and then apply an Artistic Media stroke, than to go click-
dragging with an Artistic Media brush from the get-go.
Let’s cut to the chase: in the illustration here you can see an alphabet composed
of paths. Notice this skeleton for a typeface is a little unusual: it’s narrow and the
crossbar for characters is lower than you would expect. It’s also not a complete
alphabet: there are no lowercase letters and only the essential punctuation marks.
There are two reasons for presenting this example. First, you’ll get through the
tutorials in this chapter faster if you have fewer characters to create, and second,
a typeface doesn’t necessarily have to have lowercase letters; plenty of commercial
typefaces such as Banco (ITC) are uppercase only. This is because certain fonts are
used primarily for large headlines, so you don’t need lowercase letters. However, it’s
a good idea to map the uppercase characters you create to both upper- and lowercase
keystrokes; this is done during the export process and saves you the frustration
of having to type with the CAPSLOCK key on! This example typeface, Odyssey, is
used in the following examples, and you might want to base your own font on these
characters; they’re very easy to draw.

Let’s create the first character now.

Creating the Centerline Characters

The thing you want to keep in mind when drawing the centerlines of the characters is
the center of the lines needs to end before you reach the top and bottom guidelines you
created earlier. If you don’t end a path, for example, about 30 points (using the 1,000-unit
grid you set up earlier) above the baseline, when you apply an Artistic Media stroke, the
media extends below the baseline. Fortunately, because Artistic Media strokes and their
underlying paths can be dynamically edited, this is not a big problem.
Follow these steps to create a few characters and add pages to the document:

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Tutorial   Drawing the Characters

1. Choose File | New From Template, and then load the template you set up earlier.
2. The Bézier Pen Tool might be the best tool for drawing both curved and straight
segments, so choose it from the Toolbox.
3. Drag a guideline to about 30 points above the baseline guideline; this is the
baseline for character’s skeleton; Artistic Media extends your strokes to meet
the actual font baseline at the bottom of the page. You might not even want the
Arial font as a guide in this document if you’re following the structure of the
Odyssey typeface for your own font. You can unlock the Master Guides layer
and delete the Artistic Text.
4. First, click-drag the upside-down U path, starting at the path baseline, extending
up but not reaching, the capital character (the cap height) guideline in the
template, and then click-drag down to reach the path baseline guideline. You
can now press enter to end the path.

Bézier Pen Tool

Path as a centerline

Path baseline

Font baseline

5. Click a start and an endpoint with the Bézier Pen Tool to create a horizontal
crossbar for the capital A; press enter to end the stroke. The illustration above
shows the two paths with an 8-point wide outline only so you can see it here.
Eventually the path’s outline will be hidden by Artistic Media so use any width
outline you like as you work.

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6. Click the Add Page button at the lower left of the interface. You should have
all your Master Guides in place, so it’s off to the character B in the typeface.
You’ll get the routine: draw the character, add a page. However, don’t confine
yourself to using the Bézier Pen Tool, particularly when you get to C and D.
These characters can more easily be described using an arc, and arcs are
quickly created by using the Ellipse Tool, then click-dragging outside of the
shape on the nodes to make the arc, as shown in the following figure. As you’re
designing, don’t forget to reuse paths by copying, going to the page where you
need a path, and then pasting. For example, the crossbar of the A can (and
should) be reused as the top of the capital T and the crossbars of the E and F;
the O can be reused for part of the Q and also works for the zero in this font.
Consistency is the name of the game to ensure a good-looking typeface when
you use it later.

Ellipse Tool

Click-drag outside the

ellipse to make an arc.

Add a page

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Side Bearings: Where to Position Your Characters

Even though you drew the characters according to the guidelines, there’s a little bit of
page relocation that needs to happen before you export the characters. The tops and
bottoms of the characters are probably fine, but when you type using this font, think
of where the character will begin. Characters have sidebearings: you can set the right
sidebearing when you export the character, but it’s usually a good idea to set the left
sidebearing (the point where the character begins) according to how you designed the
font. This Odyssey typeface has crossbars that overshoot some characters such as the A
to the left. If you were to type some words with this font, you’d see the crossbar needs to
extend beyond the left of the page just a little, thus making words you type look evenly
spaced. In your own work you might not design a typeface like this, but if you do, here
and now is the time to move the character, so any part of the character you want tucked
in to the character that precedes it does so on the document page. In the illustration
here, you can see what the finished A looks like compared to the page guidelines—the
crossbar extends just a little outside of the imaginary 1,000-point grid on the page—and
when the A appears in a word and a sentence, overall the spacing looks good.

Character begins
(left sidebearing)

Baseline

The Fun Part: Applying Artistic Media

Drawing the centerline is quite a bit of work, but here’s the part where it all pays off:
applying Artistic Media strokes to the characters. As mentioned before, you’re not
locked into a look for the characters—it’s quite easy to separate the Artistic Media
objects from your centerlines (ctrl+k), use a different Artistic Media style, and you
could possibly get five or six entirely different-looking typefaces using the same
centerlines! Consider consistency again, however; it’s a good idea to settle on an
Artistic Media style and keep that style for all the characters.

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Limitations and Workaround

to Paths with Artistic Media
If you think a path is too long to take an Artistic Media stroke in an eye-pleasing way,
you break the path where you think it should break using the Shape Tool. You right-click
and then choose the Break Apart command. But you’re not done, because the broken
path is still one compound object. You then press ctrl+k (Arrange | Break Curve Apart),
and life is good. However, this is a lot to remember so here is a “worst-case scenario”:
once Artistic Media is applied to a path, no Break Apart command is available. You
need to select the Artistic Media stroke on the page, not the underlying path, break the
Artistic Media from the path (ctrl+k), delete the media object, then work on the path,
and reapply the Artistic Media to the broken, individual path segments.

Depending on how you drew your characters, you might or might not get exactly
the look you’re seeking because Artistic Media wraps itself around the entire length of
a path, including bends and turns. Therefore, a stem for a character might need to be
split to get exactly the detail you need—this and other techniques are covered in the
following tutorial:

Tutorial   Stroking a Character Path

1. Choose Window | Dockers | Artistic Media. The steps you’ll follow could use any
type of Artistic Media, but for this example, let’s just work with the first Preset
on the list.
2. Because it was recommended earlier to set a baseline for the paths above the
font baseline, you’re free to choose a stroke from the selector that has a round
tip at its beginning. For simplicity’s sake, click a path in the character with the
Pick Tool, and then click the very top stroke in the list, as shown in Figure 3.
If the stroke looks too thin, increase its width using the Artistic Media Tool
Width spin box on the Property Bar. As you can see with the W character here,
the stroke doesn’t work very well; it really should break at the bottom node so
both segments of the V shape that makes up the W get the full tapering effect.
This won’t be a problem with the short crossbars to characters and single
stokes such as the capital I, but there’s a fix for this seeming problem. Tutorials
are often about problem/solution situations.
3. With the Shape Tool, click the path that then reveals itself as a dashed line. Then
it’s easy to spot the path node. Right-click over the node on the centerline,.
4. Choose Break Apart from the pop-up menu or click the Break Curve button on
the Property Bar. You’ll see the Artistic Media changes; it’s wrapping around
two parts of one path now, so you’re close to the finished character, as you can
see in Figure 4.

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Path is continuous...
so is the Artistic Media stroke.

Figure 3  Artistic Media travels the length of a path.

Figure 4  Break the path at the bottom node to make the Artistic Media travel
along two path segments.

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Figure 5  Reverse the path segment to reverse the Artistic Media stroke.

5. With the Shape Tool, drag one of the bottom nodes (horizontally) away from
the other until you have a good view of both unconnected bottom nodes.
6. Hold shift and then click the bottom node of one of the broken path segments
and then the top node of the same segment so they are both selected.
7. Click the Reverse Direction button on the Property Bar, as shown in Figure 5
(before reversal at left, after reversal at right). You’re almost there.
8. Drag the bottom node on the
path segment close to, but
not directly over, its original
position, so the Artistic Media
strokes overlap. But don’t drag
the node directly on top of
the other segment’s node. By
default, CorelDRAW rejoins
broken paths, and if you allow
the bottom node to touch
the other node, you’re back
to Step 4! See the following
illustration for the right and
Right Wrong
wrong position for the node Nodes are close. Nodes too close, path
you need to move. will join again.

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9. This is the biggest step: take what you’ve learned in this tutorial and apply
Artistic Media, the same Preset, to all the characters in the typeface, to all
the pages. If it helps visualize your characters, you can give them a fill and
no outline property when your editing work is done. After you’ve applied the
Artistic Media to all the path segments for all your characters, it’s time to detach
the strokes from their paths and export all the characters to your own typeface.

You might want to copy some of the characters to a new document window and line
them up to get a better visual idea of how your typeface will look when you actually
type with it. The following illustration shows a few of the characters from this typeface;
they align nicely and there’s good consistency because of all the preplanning and the
setting up of guidelines and using the same Artistic Media stroke for all the letters.

Exporting Your Typeface

Depending on the strokes you used on your paths, the next thing you want to do is
review the characters to make certain the baseline of the character meets the baseline
guideline; similarly, the top of the Artistic Media stroke should meet the Cap Height
guideline. Some of the Artistic Media strokes begin with a butt cap, whereas the one
recommended in this chapter’s tutorials has a round cap. Adjusting the strokes is not
a big deal; because the media is dynamically linked to the paths, use the Shape Tool to
move nodes until the ends of the Artistic Media strokes meet the proper guidelines.
It’s time now to break the Artistic Media strokes from the paths. Follow these
steps; they’re easy and the process goes quite quickly:

Tutorial   Converting Artistic Media Strokes to Objects

1. Go to the first page of your document or wherever the first letter of your
alphabet is.
2. Marquee select all the Artistic Media strokes that make up a character. Choose
Arrange | Break xx Objects Selected Apart, where xx is the number of Artistic
Media strokes that make up your character. Deselect by clicking an empty
space on the page. You might want to click the Artistic Media stroke now to
confirm that it’s now an object and not bound to the path. The Status Bar
should tell you that a Curve is selected. It also helps here to choose View |
Wireframe; this view doesn’t show object fills, so you can see the path in the
center of the (former) Artistic Media stroke.

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Figure 6  Use the Weld operation to make all the character’s components into a
single object.

3. Beginning at page 1, shift+click all the objects, not the paths.

4. Click the Weld button on the Property Bar, as shown in Figure 6.
5. You can go through all the letters in the typeface now and repeat steps 2–5,
but this tutorial will continue to the export process now. It’s simply a choice
of your workflow whether to “husk” and weld the characters in one session or
perform this process page by page.

Exporting Your Finished Font

The hard part is over; CorelDRAW’s dialogs will guide you through exporting your
characters to a typeface, but you need to understand some of the typographer’s terms
in the dialogs. You’ll learn them as you follow along.
Follow these steps to export your typeface!

Tutorial   Exporting a Character to a Digital Font

1. With you first character selected, but none of the paths, click the Export button
on the Property Bar.

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2. In the Save As Type drop-down list in the Export dialog, you can choose PFB-
Adobe Type 1 font, but for reasons discussed earlier, unless you absolutely
have to have a Type 1 font, choose TTF-True Type (*.ttf) font now, check the
Selected Only box, and then give the font a name you’ll remember later. You
can change the TrueType font name the same way you rename any other file;
its filename has nothing to do with the font’s name as it appears in Font drop-
down lists. Click Export.
3. You’re greeted by the first in a series of dialog boxes, as shown in the illustration
here. This one, Options, wants the name of the font (Family Name). Type the
name of your typeface, as you want it to appear on CorelDRAW’s and all other
applications’ font list. Think about this one, because it’s nearly impossible
to change later without buying a font utility. It’s not a Symbol font so don’t
check this box. The Style is Normal (not Bold, not Italic), and the grid you
used is 1,000 units. Leading is a relative issue, and in this example, you can
set the Leading to 0 because you only used about 700 of the 1,000-unit grid
for the height of the characters. Finally, Space Width is the space between
words—Space is actually a character in a typeface. This is a narrow font; usually
300 units is a good value, and perhaps 280 is best for this font—go a little narrow
due to the characters being narrow. Click OK; then click OK to respond to Save
Changes To Font File, and it’s on to the next dialog.

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4. Here’s where the show takes place. By default, Character Width is set to
Auto, and usually this is a good option. However, the right vertical line in
the preview window shows exactly where the character ends and the next
character you type with the finished, installed font begins. You can call this
kerning (intercharacter spacing). Eyeball this preview window (there’s really
no way to judge before you use the font); if the space looks too tight, uncheck
Auto, and then use the Character Width spin box controls to increase or
decrease the right sidebearing for the character.
5. Click the character in the Character Number box that corresponds to the
character you’re exporting. In Figure 7, you can see the A is selected. Click
OK, and you have one character in a new font saved.
6. Click the Export button again, and this time there’s no Options box—you simply
choose the TTF file from where you saved it in the True Type Export dialog.
You’ll see a dialog box asking permission to replace the file: click Yes.

Click the
corresponding
character.

Figure 7  Assign the selected object a keystroke in the True Type Export dialog.

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7. Choose the lowercase a in the Character Number box this time; then click
OK. Now you’ve used the same character design twice, but when you type,
you’ll get the same character when you press A, with or without holding shift.
There are few things in life as annoying as a typeface that has no lowercase
CHARACTERS!
8. Continue through the pages, export all the characters, numbers, and punctuation
characters. If by chance you assign the wrong Character Number to a character,
you can go back, choose the correct one, and CorelDRAW asks you if you want to
overwrite the existing definition. In this case, yes you do.

Tip Under certain conditions, you can export one or more characters to an existing
font. Those conditions are:
You have permission to. There is a coding in commercial typefaces that sometimes
is written to prohibit users from tampering with the font. Commercial typefaces fall
under the Digital Rights Management Act; they’re actually little runtime programs;
and unless you have a very real and pressing need to hack a commercial font, don’t
do it. If you do, don’t share it or post it anywhere.
The font is Type 1 or TrueType. CorelDRAW cannot export to OpenType or other
proprietary font file formats.
You know what you’re doing, and you have a backup copy of the font. You have to
make absolutely certain that your character height, baseline, and other properties
for the characters you want to write into this font match. And this sort of thing
can take quite a while to become good at.

Creating a Logo Font

Especially for small businesses, having your logo as a typeface can speed up the
office workflow and serve a number of different and valuable purposes. Imagine the
letterhead stationery you can generate, at any paper size, when you have a font with
your logo in it. You can put that font on a keychain thumb drive and always have it
available—at a print house, a convention, and a novelty manufacturer—who might not
have CorelDRAW on their computers.
A logo font follows the same conventions as a symbol font such as Wingdings and
Zapf Dingbats: it’s simply a little picture assigned to a keystroke, and you now know
most of the procedure. The dimensions of your logo, however, are a consideration;
many logos are very wide, and they don’t fit well on the grid template you set up
earlier. And it’s usually not a good idea to scale the logo down to fit the grid width. The
result would be a keystroke in the font that requires all your hired help to scale the
logo up to 2,000 points in their WordPerfect or Word document! No problem, however:
you can break up the logo into two pieces, and the tutorials in this section show you a
little about perfectly aligning the pieces so when typed, they create your logo without
a seam. The following illustration shows a logo for a fictitious antique company copied
and placed on the template you designed at the beginning of this chapter. Get out

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your own logo or design one now,

and then align it on the grid like this
illustration: the left edge needs to
meet the left of the page; the bottom
needs to meet the baseline guide; it
should be about 750 points in height;
and just leave the right edge dangling
off the right of the page for the
moment.

Cutting Your Logo in Two

In this example, we lucked out and the break in the logo can happen between the
N and the T in ANTIQUES. If your logo is similar, what you want to do is use the
Arrange| Break Apart command (ctrl+k) in the area of the design where you need
to separate the pieces, and then use the Arrange | Combine (ctrl+l) command after
marquee-selecting the components of the logo that are broken apart but shouldn’t
be. If you have a logo that needs to be split in the middle of an illustration, use the
Knife Tool with Auto-close On Cut enabled on the Property Bar and Keep As One
Object disabled. Drag a guideline to the cut area to ensure that your cut is clean and
perfectly vertical. In the following figure, you can see (because the two objects have
been recolored only to show this example) that the left side of the logo extends a little
to the right of the page grid (this is okay to do), and the other part is off the page, but
it will be moved on the page shortly.
If your logo contains text you’ve typed into it, convert this text to curves and add
it to the rest of the design.

One object One object

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Bonus Chapter 1  Creating Your Own Font 23

Exporting the Two Logo Pieces

The way it stands right now, the logo can be exported to the TrueType file format
as two characters, and there’s really no immediate need to fill all the keystrokes
in the typeface with anything else for the resulting font to be usable. You could
put additional symbols or a custom typeface into this new font, but all that’s really
necessary is to make the alignment of the two pieces perfect when typed using
the font and assigning characters everyone at this business will easily remember.
A lowercase l and then a lowercase c, for Lost Coral is easy to remember, so all that’s
left is to export the l keystroke—the part of the logo that is aligned to the template.
Measure the right distance between the first and second part of the logo, and then
align the second part and export it.
Follow these steps to export a logo of your own:

Tutorial   Exporting a Two-Part Logo Font, Part 1

1. Choose File | New From Template, and then browse for the typography template
you saved at the beginning of this chapter.
2. Copy your logo to the template, and then (if necessary) scale and position the
logo as discussed in the previous section.
3. Zoom into the rightmost extent of the first part of the logo. Look at the horizontal
ruler, drag a guide if necessary, but by all means you need to know the width. In
this example, the first part of the Lost Coral logo extends a little beyond the page
to 1,014 points. Write this number down for your own logo font.
4. Select the left part of the logo, the part on the page, and then click the
Export button.
5. In the Export dialog, choose TTF-True Type Font from the Save As Type drop-
down list, and then name your font file. In this example, it’s Lost Coral logo
.ttf. Check the Selected Only check box, and then click Export.
6. In the Options dialog box, type the name you want your users to see (Lost
Coral logo, in this example) in the Family Name field. Because this is a Symbol
font, check the Symbol Font check box. The Grid Size is correct at 1000, and
(word) Space Width is immaterial—no one is going to press the spacebar when
using this logo font—so it can be set to 0, or to about 300 if you plan to add
typeface characters to this font at a future time. Click OK, and then click Yes in
the True Type Export confirmation box.
7. Uncheck the Auto check box for Character Width and then type the width you
saw in Step 3. For the Lost Coral logo, the value is 1014; for your own logo, the
width might be different.
8. Change the Design Size field to match the size of the font template document. In
this chapter, 1,000 points has been used for your template, so enter 1000 here.
9. For the Lost Coral logo, the lowercase l is a good character number. Choose for
your own two-part logo a lowercase character number that’s easy to remember,
and then click OK to export the first character.

Here comes the tricky part: the first part of the logo ends exactly at the character
width you entered during export. This means there will be absolutely no space between

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this first character, and the next one you export. And this is good most of the time,
particularly when your logo needs to be perfectly joined when users type the two
keystrokes that make the logo.
This Lost Coral logo is a little different because it breaks between the N and
the T. If your logo is like this one, you’re in luck because the following set of steps
shows a quick manual way to keep the spacing perfect between characters if your
own logo requires this.

Tutorial   Exporting a Two-Part Logo Font, Part 2

1. With the Rectangle Tool, click-drag a rectangle exactly and precisely where you
want a gap between the first and second part of the logo font, as shown here.
2. Using the Pick Tool, shift+click the second part of the logo to add it to the
selected rectangle.
Use a rectangle to measure distance.

3. Hold ctrl to constrain movement, and then drag the rectangle and the second
part of the logo to the left guideline at the left of the page. Be careful to only
drag left—you want the second part of the logo to align to the first part you
already exported. Use the left and right keyboard arrow keys to nudge the
two objects if necessary. The rectangle’s left side should be touching the left
guideline.
4. Select only the second part of the logo now and then click the Export button.
In the Export box make sure Selected Only is checked and that you’ve chosen
the same font as the one you exported the first part of the logo to.
5. Choose the letter you want to represent the second half of the logo. For Lost
Coral, the lowercase c works fine, as shown here. The user only needs to
remember the initials of the place they work!

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Distance measured
by the rectangle

Installing Your Font

Naturally after your hard work you want the payoff; it’s very simple to install your
font right now. Go to the Start menu, choose Control Panel | Fonts. Now that the Fonts
window is open, you can drag your font file from an open window where you saved it,
into the Fonts window. The font is now available to CorelDRAW and every application
that uses typefaces. The Fonts utility in Control Panel copies typefaces; you didn’t
move the font—but you might want to copy it to a safe location now.
This chapter is an integration chapter; you’ve seen how to use a lot of CorelDRAW’s
tools that are documented in previous chapters to actually make a tool of your own:
a digital typeface. In Figure BC-8, you can see that some of CorelDRAW’s templates
were used to create letterhead envelopes, a trifold brochure, and even hang tags, all
using a custom font, and all the work you see here took about 15 minutes.

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26 CorelDRAW® X7: The Official Guide

Figure 8  Use a logo font in combination with templates to make stationery,

T-shirt transfers, and all your signature business needs.

Now that you have a font, you’re going to want to type a lot of words. Fortunately,
if you buy CorelDRAW X7: The Official Guide (hint, hint), Chapter 11 shows you how
CorelDRAW can help you spell your words correctly, make grammar suggestions, and
write a SIGGRAPH paper all by itself.
Only kidding about the last part!

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