#Glyphs in illustrator how to

To make the glyphs active, access the Open Type panel and make sure all the buttons at the bottom of the panel are activated. Second, you need to make sure that the alternate glyphs are active for the font.

#Glyphs in illustrator how to

Lucky for you, I’m here to show you exactly where they are lurking.įirst, make sure you know how to install fonts on your computer. They can be kind of tricky to find if you don’t know where to look. Now that you know what alternate glyphs are, let’s look at how to access the alternate characters in a font. HOW TO USE ALTERNATE GLYPHS IN ILLUSTRATOR In Happy Hour, I designed a contextual alternate lowercase “l” and “h”.

Contextual alternates – Contextual alternates are different forms of letters that are specifically designed to be used at the beginning or end of a word.

For example, in Happy Hour, I created a stylistic alternate (o) that you can use instead of the regular “o”.

Stylistic alternates – Stylistic alternates are different forms of the same letter.

In my font, Happy Hour, I included ligatures for several combinations. Some examples include double “o”, double “l”, “th” or “ing”.

Ligatures – Ligatures are common combinations of two or more letters.

When I use the word “glyph” in this post, I’m referring to the alternate forms, or the “extras” of the letters and symbols in some fonts. The letters and symbols that make up a font are all glyphs but some of those letters and symbols have alternate forms. Glyph is just another term for a character or symbol. I have since moved on to using Illustrator because Illustrator is made specifically for designing whereas Photoshop Elements is more of a photo editing program. A while back, I wrote a post on how to do this in Photoshop Elements because that was the program that I used to design back then. I’m here today to show you exactly how to access and use alternate glyphs in Illustrator.

I know a lot of you save fonts and then don’t know how to access all the extra stuff. There are just so many beautiful fonts out there and a lot of them come with “extras” like different variations of letters and swoops and swirls that you can add to your text to make it look really unique. Take your designs up a notch by learning how to access the alternate glyphs that come with fonts in Adobe Illustrator.