Custom Fonts

I would like to make some custom fonts. Sadly both the tools on synthetic orchestra and yummybeats give me weird results (as in weird spaces between some letters etc...). So I guess I will have to do it myself. But how, I can´t find any resources.
It seems like I need:
- a transparent background
- a fully opaque red dot on top of each letter
- all the letters and symbols in the right order...

anybody got some real insights?

 

The synthetic orchestra tool should definitely work and is the easiest way to convert a font for Kontakt. Did you quit and re-open Kontakt when you tried a new font? You'll have to do it, it's a known issue in Kontakt.

 

Hm somehow still doesnt quite look the same

 

Char spacing should be either 0 or 1 px depending on the font. Blake's tool is ok for quick testing but if you want best precision you gotta do it manually (because web browser font renderer is not the same font renderer as in, say, Photoshop or Illustrator etc.). You can use the file that Blake's Kontakt font tool spits out as the basis (if for nothing, at least for character set, which is codepage Windows-1252). Here's stuff that I know:

1. The background not only needs to be transparent, it needs to be solid transparent. Which means it has to contain one single "color". Photoshop by default doesn't export PNGs like this, so you need a special file export plugin called SuperPNG that does this when you tick the option "Clear transparent" when saving. This is super important.

2. If the width of the picture font PNG changes, when reapplying the script in Kontakt everything will look garbled and you will have to restart Kontakt. Uncool bug but it is what it is...

 

Oh great thank you very much I will definitely fool around with that a little bit! Hope I will make it

 

https://syntheticorchestra.com/kontaktfont/
https://blog.yummybeats.com/ksp-kon...-types-with-kontakt-6-via-custom-font-sprite/

 

The first link is exactly the tool we've already been talking about

The second seems to have just lifted Blake's code and put it behind an account/paywall. Uncool.

 

Yeah... luckily I did not pay. My guess is that it comes with the same problems though(at least the free trial version). Maybe somebody in the future who has an account there can say more!

 

i've been messing around with this. At first I had unusable results. Seems like the synthetic orchestra parameters may be too broad or formatting not correct at the head for some fonts. I found something that did work. Try this.
1. Put your font into synthetic orchestra and start with a size like font size 11, spacing 1 ,space width 4
2. overlay it with the "custom font" that comes with creator tools in a photo editing app and put one of them at reduced opacity so you can
see them together
3.if the letters don't line up too well, try another attempt in synthetic orchestra messing with the params.Drag your synthetic orchestra image so the characters line up with the CT font. Get the first one right if the others drift a few px that's ok.
4.For me using a .otf font , i found using the formatting at the front (the red dots) very different so I erased that part of the synthetic orchestra image and copied that part from the "custom font" from CT. It seems to work, at least for the characters I needed.
It's pretty darn small. not sure if this will work for bigger fonts

 

Hm, not sure what your problem with the synthetic orchestra font tool is. I always get very usable results, also for bigger font sizes like 24 points. What do you mean by 'unusable results'?

 

Like it's reading an image from the wrong part, you see parts of the wrong letters. I did manage to get something working for now

 

Did you really quit and re-launch Kontakt each time you tried a new custom font? Because that is necessary (most of the time) if you want to avoid strange results.
And like Mario said, when you edit a font in photoshop, you need to save it with the SuperPNG plugin ("Clean Transparent" checked).

 

I did quit kontakt repeatedly. I don't have access to photoshop or a PC, but I have something that works for this situation

 

This turned out to be very helpful. I didn't have access to photoshop or that plugin, but I found if I went into pixelmater and seperated the control dots and the text into separate layers, then export the layers as a png, that also fixed the issue completely