Bogen

Docs Fonts of your own

Fonts of your own

Ask your agent for a typeface, and it draws one in your file: a display face for a headline, a logotype that types, a set of figures for a poster. Bogen builds it into a real font, OTF and WOFF2, and text in the file can use it at once. Exports carry it.

On this page (7)

How a font is kept

A font lives on a page of its own, named after it, such as Quire Display glyphs. On that page:

The font's names, metrics and kerning are kept with the file, beside the page. Undo takes back a change to the glyphs like any other.

Coordinates in a cell are font units, y down, with 0 on the ascender line. With the default metrics (1000 units per em, ascender 800, cap height 700, x-height 500, descender -200) the baseline is at y 800 and the cap height at y 100. This is how agents write glyphs, and how the canvas draws them.

Asking an agent

Say what the face is for and how it should feel: "a heavy squared display face for our posters, capitals and figures". The agent works in a loop it reads in guide_get fonts:

  1. font_create makes the page with the metrics.
  2. font_glyphs_set writes glyphs from SVG path data, up to 200 at a time. It starts with H, O, n and o, which set the stems, rounds and spacing for the rest, and answers with each glyph's bounds and side bearings, and with notes such as a counter that fills in.
  3. font_build makes the font; font_specimen sets it on a specimen artboard beside the glyphs: a waterfall, a pangram, your own words, spacing strings (HOHOH, nonon) and the kerning pairs. The agent looks at it with a screenshot and fixes what does not hold together.
  4. font_kerning_set kerns the pairs that spacing cannot fix, such as AV and LT. font_update changes names and metrics; the guides of every cell follow, and outlines stay on the baseline.

fonts_made lists the fonts made in the file and whether the glyphs changed since the last build. The MCP tool reference has every argument.

The glyph page in the editor

Open the font's page. With nothing selected, the Font panel on the right shows:

With a cell or an outline selected, Build font stays at the top of the inspector, above the layer's own sections. To change a glyph's advance, change the cell's width.

Where to start from

Using the font

After a build, the font is a font of the file: in the inspector's font list it comes first, marked Made here. Agents set it with "Quire Display", sans-serif as the font family. Screenshots, exports and published pages load it from the file, never from Google Fonts.

font_build with brand: true also adds the font to the brand the file links to, as a suggested family that the person confirms in the brand. Files linked to the brand then get it too.

Licences

A font you draw from scratch is yours. Say which licence it has, if any, with license: OFL-1.1 puts it under the SIL Open Font License and writes the licence fields into the font.

Starting from someone else's font is allowed only when the font file itself says it may be changed:

Limits