: How to Overlay [Selected] Glyph Outlines from Separate Fonts for Comparison? Both FontLab Studio and Fontographer have a Blend feature, which can produce decent results when working with fonts
Both FontLab Studio and Fontographer have a Blend feature, which can produce decent results when working with fonts which are visually as well as structurally similar, to save time creating new weights or widths by averaging others together. This process is called interpolation.
However, that won't wouldn't work for me with what I have in mind. At least not in the traditional sense or any way I'm used to. The fonts I will be working with will often not share compatible outlines (which is rather the point) and besides, I don't want the computer to make awkward choices that require artistic insight: I'd like to decide which aspects of each to keep, scrap, or change.
I only bring it up because when one blends a light font and a bold font, for example, and arrive at a medium font: the glyph preview looks solid, but up close one can see where the two glyphs overlapped, like overlaying two pieces of tracing paper. I know Fontographer has the option to print each selected-glyph scaled to the size of a sheet of paper. I want to know if there is a way to do this but with one glyph from two fonts on each page. Short of manually creating a layered Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign document for every glyph pair!
If anyone knows of a way to accomplish this or anything like it, in any application whatsoever, I am not picky! I just want a time-saving solution.
wouldn't help me as my examples have drastically different (incompatible) outlines
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InDesign's data merge is one option.
InDesign Help / Data merge
Create a CSV file that lists all the glyphs you want to place in your document. The first line should be the title of the record (which isn't important, it's only the placeholder you'll see in InDesign). Each character/glyph should be on a new line. For example:
Create your InDesign document with one page and set up your text frames (including font and point size) for each glyph.
Open the Data Merge panel (Window → Utilities → Data Merge), choose Select Data Source from the panel menu and load your CSV file.
Drag the record name for your glyphs from the data merge panel to each of the text frames you set up.
(The placeholder for the records will probably be overset since you'll likely have a very large point size so check Preview from the data merge panel and you'll see the first record instead.)
Export your data merge. From the data merge panel menu either choose Create Merged Document which will create a new InDesign document with all your records or Export To PDF which will create a PDF for you:
If you want to overlay the outlines of your glyphs, simply align the text frames and give the text a stroke and no fill:
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