The font design mode turns Puntotek into a workshop for stitch typefaces: you draw each letter as a little pattern, and those fonts then let you write stitchable text into any work.
And some good news before you start: there is no new program to learn. You draw with the same tools, the same stitches and the same colour charts as always. The difference is three buttons that do not exist in the normal editor — the left limit, the baseline and the right limit — and they are exactly what turns a pile of little drawings into a font that writes properly.
How to get there
In Settings → Working mode, switch from graphic design to font design (it asks for confirmation). The main screen is the same, but now you work on the font grid instead of on a piece of fabric.
The glyph grid
A font is a grid of cells, one per character in the font’s set (letters, numbers, signs… and the space). Each cell is a mini canvas where you draw that character with the usual tools.
The information point at the bottom tells you which character you are on as you move around the grid, which is more useful than it sounds once you have half an alphabet and every cell starts to look the same.
The three font buttons
They live in the green bar on the right when you work in font mode, and all three behave the same: you press the button and then tap the cell where you want to leave the mark. You can redo it as many times as you need; the mark is not a stitch, it is neither stitched nor printed.
Left limit
Marks where the letter starts inside its cell. Everything left of that line is air: it is the margin the letter will keep when it is written next to the previous one.
- What it is for: So that an i does not drag along the gap of an m. The limit is what makes the letters sit together sensibly.
- If you set it too far left: The letter will write with too much air in front and the word will come out scattered.
Baseline
The line that every letter rests on, like the ruled line in a notebook. It is not set letter by letter on a whim: it is what keeps the word straight when you mix capitals, lower case and signs.
- The usual: Almost every letter sits right on top of the baseline.
- The ones that drop: The p, the j or the g have to cross the line downwards. That is where a well placed baseline shows.
Right limit
Marks where the letter ends. Between the left limit and the right one lies the real width of the glyph, and that width is what the text editor uses to place the next letter.
- What it is for: So the text advances just right: no letters on top of each other and no extra gaps.
- Trick: Leave it almost touching the last stitch of the letter and adjust the overall air with the spacing slider in the text editor, which works on the whole word at once.
Bridge colour
Adds a special colour to your palette called ##1##, in fluorescent green. It is not a thread: it is a placeholder holding the place of a colour you will choose later.
- What it is for: Stitch the letters with it and leave the flowers or decorations of the font in their real colours. The same font then works in red, in blue or in whatever colour each work calls for.
- How it is settled: With the usual colour replacement, from the palettes menu. The font keeps the placeholder; the colour is decided in the work where you paste it.
- It is only created here: It appears in no thread chart, because it does not exist as a thread. That is why its name, ##1##, looks like no reference on the market.
- If you print without changing it: It shows in the PDF key as a colour of your choice, and its stitches count towards the skeins like any other: you will use that thread, only its colour is undecided.
Everything else is the usual editor. You draw the letter with the drawing tools, pick stitches in the stitches menu and colours in the charts — a letter can carry several colours, just like any pattern. Undo, zoom and copy and paste work exactly as you know them.
Saving the font
You save it from the file menu, like any other work. Your fonts appear in the Fonts tab of the file list, and with the cloud button on they also go up to your cloud.
Using the fonts
Here is the trick of the whole system: in font design mode, opening a font from the list loads it in the workshop so you can carry on editing it; in normal mode, opening it takes you to the text editor, where you write with it and the text is pasted into your work as one more motif.
Tips
- Start with a few letters (the ones in your phrase) and grow the font over time: you do not need the whole alphabet on day one.
- Keep a similar stroke weight across every letter: that is what gives the font its unity.
- Try the font often in the text editor: writing a real word uncovers badly set limits straight away.
- The word that best uncovers the faults is illa or mimo: it puts the narrowest next to the widest, and there you see whether the limits are right.
- Save as soon as you have two or three decent letters. A font grows over weeks and saves like any other work, so do not wait until it is finished.