Today, we’re trilled to announce that Fontself is no more a single product play.
We are shipping a brand new platform for hosting and using DIY & personal fonts on web and mobile: Fontself Catapult.
Catapult was born out of our frustration with current solutions to use fonts wherever we wanted, and it lays the ground for a whole new experience of making and using fonts.
Soon, additional apps and tools will complement our offering, getting you one step closer to the vision we had when we started our journey 12 years ago.
Welcome to the Future of Web Typography !
Fontself Catapult
Currently for Illustrator users only
With Catapult, we took care to solve all the complexity of generating and using web fonts so you can just have more fun:
- Create & host web fonts in one click, right from Illustrator CC
- Don’t mess with font files (just use 2 lines of code in your HTML)
- Serve color fonts to compatible browsers (Firefox & Edge for now, Safari coming this week to macOS 10.14 & iOS 12 ;)
- Easy guides to use fonts in WordPress, newsletters or other sites
And more is coming next to Catapult:
- Preview your fonts on any website via a browser extension
- Use them on mobile via a dedicated app
- Embed an interactive font specimen on any website
- Export web fonts files for self-hosting
Catapult will have a paid subscription (pricing TBD) but the beta preview is totally free. You can check the entire FAQs here.
Kerning Groups
Ever felt the pain of kerning many similar glyphs like A, À, Â, and Á? Or did you wish all the glyphs that have rounded left sides like C, Q, G had the same left kerning value as your O?
Then just go to Advanced > Kerning > Groups and start linking the left or right sides of a glyph to the ones of another glyph. That’s kerning groups!
In this example, all the kerning pairs starting with A (like AV) will be applied to ÀV, ÂV, ÁV and all the kerning pairs ending with A (like VA) will be applied to VÀ, VÂ, VÁ as well as VÆ.
Import Kerning & Spacing metrics
What about bringing all the work you have done on a fontstyle into another font file?
You can now import all spacing & kerning values from other font files right into the Advanced menus — just bear in mind that there is still no Undo in Fontself (so just reopen a font file to discard all unwanted changes).
PS: to help you kickstart your work on kerning pairs & groups, we gathered a set of 46 kerning groups and 382 predefined pairs into a dummy font file, whose kerning values can be included in any font via the Import Kerning button.
Windows bug fixes
Exporting fonts on Windows should now lead to fewer invalid fonts for Latin & Cyrillic scripts, as alternates, ligatures or kerning could previously cause troubles.
And to improve the experience for first-time users, we renamed the Export button to Save and placed it next to Open (just in case you wondered where it went ;)
That’s about it.
Now if you liked this Fontself update, please clap below as many times as you want to express your excitement (yep, you clap up to 50 times ;)
It’s time to unleash your creativity and have fun: so update your copy of Fontself Maker or get a new one on www.fontself.com
PS: this page features 3 great typefaces: Herbarium, a great font by Anna Markovets, featuring rich ligatures, and Chromage Serif, a geometric design by Robert Bell.
