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January 20

Tweaking a font

I would like to make some tweaks to an (open-source) font that I like. I want to change the weight of the bold glyphs and the slant angle of the italic glyphs. Is there an easy way to modify those two aspects consistently for all the glyphs in a font? --134.242.92.97 (talk) 20:52, 20 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

For a pixel-based font, somehow I doubt it, as doing those things might close up interior spaces in some characters, and you would need to manually fix those by changing them pixel by pixel. You might also run off the edge of the bitmap in some cases, and need to adjust for that. StuRat (talk) 03:09, 21 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

It depends on the font format. If it's Metafont, it should be relatively easy, as that format was designed to make those changes easy. But few people know all the details of Metafont, and I'm not one of them. The format is rarely used directly nowadays, but often automatically converted to more common formats. In other formats, changing the slant angle of an italic font may be doable, but is unlikely to give very good results without manual tweaking.

Note that things like Arial-bold, Times-roman, Times-italic and Computer-modern-bold-italic-10pt are properly called fonts, things like Helvetica, Times New Roman and Computer Modern are called font families. Metafont actually describes font families; by choosing the right values for parameters like stroke width and slant angle it can generate multiple fonts. PiusImpavidus (talk) 12:48, 21 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

For the common outline formats, this sort of thing should be easy in FontForge, a free font editor. —Tamfang (talk) 07:48, 22 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]