Working with Font Types

Working with Font Types

Explains the different types of font types compatible with Doodly, their definitions and what to watch out for when working with fonts in Doodly as well as the best practices for naming and organization of fonts.

Font Types

Doodly is compatible with 2 different font types; TTF and OTF.

What is TTF?

TrueType Font, more commonly known as TTF, uses glyphs to provide the appearance of a font. TTF has been used for quite a few years and is compatible with almost everything.

What is OTF?

OpenType Font, more commonly known as OTF, uses a combination of glyphs and compact font format tables to create the font appearance. Using this combination allows for smaller file sizes. Most TTF files that may be seen on the outside may be OTF data without compact font format contained within it just to keep the compatibility of TTF. OTF started picking up mainstream use in the mid 90’s.

Compatibility

Not all OTF or TTF fonts work in Doodly and some, regardless of being named as an OTF or TTF files are not compatible. There is no method of determining this without trying them but if it is not compatible they will appear as rectangles instead of the expected letters. Some Tamil language TTF files are a good example of this behavior as some of them don’t read properly in Doodly even though they are TTF files.

Font-Family

Sometimes an entire font-family is kept inside a single TTF. This is bad because Doodly does not offer the ability to rename these fonts with multiple different types of the same font are imported from a single TTF file. Doodly is best compatible with a TTF file that has 1 style font. This allows for renaming the font file.

Renaming

The only time a font file can be renamed in Doodly is during the importing process so ensure that you have your name and organizational scheme setup before importing the files. A typical imported font name will look like helvetica-bld-itl.ttf. We can rename that to Helvetica Bold Italics for a nicer more organized look to it.

Native Fonts

Doodly comes natively with 35 fonts for the standard version and 70 fonts for the Enterprise version. All these fonts can be obtained in free for commercial use places but they are here in Doodly as a convenience.

Organization

Doodly separates the user imported fonts and the Doodle provided fonts so you’ll find two different alphabetical lists. Upon initially importing a font, the font goes to the top of the list. When closing out of the project and reopening the project, Doodly will alphabetize the font.

Adding a font

Clicking on the font objects library and then clicking the + sign will bring up a window that will allow for dragging and dropping a font onto it or choosing the browse button to select a font file from the computer.

Removing a font

Right clicking on the font and choosing delete will remove the font from the list.