i finished penciling the first half panel and decided to see what it looked like with my super-super-cool hand made eddie in space font. since this was no small feat, i shall tell you all the lurid details:

first, this required use of my old copy of macromedia fontographer, which is no less than 10 years old, and  has to launch in classic mode (OS 9). to my surprise, my scanner doesn’t work when classic mode is active, but this is is neither here nor there. because fontographer is so ancient, it doesn’t understand the subtle, nuancey curvey strokes and paths of illustrator CS2, wherein i had designed my new font. so i decide to open the file in an equally ancient version of macromedia freehand that i can only hope will be able to communicate, copy and paste to fontographer. however, ancient as it is, freehand also doensn’t understand the newfangled paths of illustrator, so i set out to export the file in a legacy format that freehand might be able to open. through trial and error, i find that illustrator can only save backwards so far, version 8 apparently, which still is much too fancy for poor freehand, which is also version 8, which you’d think would be enough of a common ground to understand foreign file formats. but you’d be wrong. so off i go, having to launch my old copy of illustrator 8, save out the file as an illustrator 6 file, which to my joy and satisfaction, is dumbed down enough for freehand to open. joy. however this joy was short-lived. freehand and fontographer, despite being made by the same company, still cannot copy/paste between the two programs. but fontographer can import EPS files generated by freehand, so i go about making an individual EPS file for every character in my font, which is 84 for those of you at home keeping score. after a lengthy copy/paste/save as/import exercise, my font is finally done. but only as some weird bastardized mix of postscript and true type…my machine understands nieither on its own, but collectively as a whole. so far it’s been a very odd and frustrating experience, but i think the end result kicks some cartoon aesthetic ass. it looks like i may have to go back and adjust some of the metrics (kerning) of some letters, but for now i want to see the fruits of my sleep-deprived labors. and so too, gentle jerkwad, can you. too. enjoy.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 11th, 2007 at 12:58 am and is filed under sketches n stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.