FontSlab Tabbed Dialog Guide Part 2: Spacing Options

[Skinnyhouse]

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This is the second part of the guide to the tabbed dialog version of FontSlab.

There is a pdf version of the guide:

Tabbed-FontSlab-Spacing-Guide-Part-2.pdf

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The FontSlab 0.14-tab plug-in is included in the Resources folder for Part 1 of the guide.

There is also a zipped Resources folder to accompany this guide which includes:

Argos_George_Canary_letters_only custom font file
loopy path path file

Resources-Spacing.zip

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Unpack the resources folder and save it to your preferred location. The path file should be imported to the image (I used a new image size of 1000x800) you create for this project.

Fire up the Gimp and add a curving path to your image either by using the path tool or by importing the path file from the path tool dock.

Spacing between characters can have a dramatic effect on the appearance of your text. FontSlab has a number of options that can influence this. The first two examples show the effect of the changing size of the space character in text along a path.

[Skinnyhouse]

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This next example applies the step change (and also the space character size) value to whole words rather than to characters i.e. the space size changes more. You will need to increase the step size to see the effect. The advantage of this is to give weight to those words nearer the start of the path.

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FontSlab also has an option to directly adjust the spacing between characters independently of any changes in the text size step. Here the spacing is increased between the characters along the path.

Slide_3_tab_Spacing.jpg (198.02 KiB) Viewed 2289 times

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The spacing between the characters can also be reduced. The example below uses a rather extreme value to illustrate the option.

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