Re: TECH: Adventures in idiocy using FontCreator

Geoff Horswood wrote:
>
>Yesterday I started playing with the evaluation copy
>of FontCreator I downloaded, trying to make a decent
>Franj font from pieces of Greek and Cyrillic character
>sets...
>
>...and promptly managed to install said finished
>product over the top of the Arial regular font, so
>that when I went online, everything that wasn't in
>bold or italics was in Franj script.
>
>It took more than 3 hours to reassemble the alphabet
>once I realised what had happened.
>
>I'm still not sure why it did what it did.  Anyone
>care to help save me from my own idiocy?
>
That happened to me too, a long time ago, around 2001 when I was creating my
Kash website....I think maybe FCP summons up Arial by default, and then we
start modifying it all unsuspecting.  It was quite a jolt to see my Yahoo
home page in a mixture of Roman and Kash script!!

I never figured out how to get a blank template to work with-- what I did
(and perhaps you did too?) was to select a font that I figured I'd never
use-- e.g. PTBarnum-- and modify that.   But that was several computer/virus
deaths ago, and in the meantime a Kind Stranger re-created the font for me,
as a proper ttf.

You're probably more computer-savvy than I was/am, so the following warning
may be irrelevant-- but when FCP's 30-day trial period ends, you will no
longer be able to view or edit your font, or any other (e.g. fonts available
for download mentioned in conlang websites) . (Though yours, installed, will
remain usable.)  As I say, that may have been due to my idiocy, or maybe a
bug in their program that has been eliminated by now. Various people
suggested a remedy-- turning the computer's clock back-- but that struck me
as dangerously radical surgery. Maybe I should have uninstalled FCP after
the trial period ended...?

FWIW, I at one time had a bootleg "registered" copy of FCP that worked OK
except for some of the functions-- it wouldn't do composite chars., rotating
or mirror-imaging inter alia. No loss when that version got
scrubbed..........