This week friend of the show Doug returns to join Ian and Ben as they discuss making fonts. But first, Ian brings us this week’s headlines.
Hackers target Starbucks gift cardholders. Outrage as students forced to strip naked with male professor and perform ‘erotic gesture’ by candlelight before being allowed to graduate from University of California, San Diego. Kotaku:The Horrible World Of Video Game Crunch. Amazon may let indie merchants ship directly to Prime customers. How many PlayStation 2s would make a Galaxy S6?
Ben also brings in a headline, Harry Shearer Leaving ‘The Simpsons’. This leads into a discussion on what’s going to happen to all of his beloved characters and talk of just how long the show’s been running. Ben then shows us several TV and movie trailers. This includes CBS’s new Supergirl series.
ABC’s new fall series for The Muppets.
Ian brings up the animated pilot the Jim Henson company did for Amazon.
And the new Mad Max: Fury Road.
Moving on to the main topic this week, Ben tells of his adventures in font making recently. He shares links to free font making programs like FontForge and Birdfont where you draw every glyph in their editor, as well as font making websites like the free MyScriptFont.com where you fill out a template file and Fontifier.com which charges $9 to download. High-Logic’s FontCreator has some nice features for importing glyphs and is pretty easy to use. It’s Windows-only but runs well in CrossOver or variants of Wine. Just be aware the 30 day trial version doesn’t allow exports and you’re not allowed to sell fonts made with the Home Edition. FontLab has an assortment of software in a range of prices. FontLab Studio for $649 and Fontographer for $399 to TypeTool for $47.99 and FontLab Pad for free. Though they have Mac versions Ben saw forum threads saying certain programs wouldn’t run on Intel machines and other indicators to question the age of the programs. Glyphs (249.90 €) and Glyphs Mini (44.99 €) were some nice looking apps for the Mac but weren’t as simple for importing art as FontCreator.
Finally Ian, Doug, and Ben all hunker down for some music trivia. Who will emerge victorious this week? Tune in to find out!
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