Hi! I built a set of SBIX colour fonts for printing and I’m getting a colour issue on only one of them.
My sources are all in CMYK US Web Coated SWOP v2 colour space.
I made a document in the same colour space with the font to try it out and the green font displays a different colour than the TIFF Sources. I have no idea what is happening as there is no issue with the pink or black version.
Would anyone help me troubleshoot this? Thanks!
SBIX needs RGB images.
This design is tricky because it needs to seamlessly align to a background and will be printed. The CMYK fonts work fine in Pink and Black though.
Is there some step on the export where the sources are converted to RGB?
Could I send over files to be looked at?
EDIT: These RGB colours are not correct either, this screenshot better represents what I’m seeing
Right now, the exported font will contain a .png in RGB colors.
I just had a look at the state of the support in different apps. I actually managed to write a CMYK sbix but all apps that support sbix on my machine, where showing a RGB version of it.
The system seems to convert the colors, so getting it to match might be tricky. Try to save the image as a RGB .png. That should give you the best control over the colors. You need to switch to an all RGB workflow, thou.
Ok, I’ll make not of that! Thanks for looking into it Georg.
To anyone in the future looking to make colour fonts for print: conversion is much closer when using the FOGRA 39 CMYK colour space on the sources
Hi Georg, I’m creating an SBIX font using watercolour painted characters exported from Photoshop. Up until now, I’ve been exporting them as 512, 256 & 72px for digital use, but want to create a print version. Would best practice be to start a separate Glyphs file, export the painted characters from PSD at (something like) 7000px and rename the iColor layer to 7000px, to ensure the PNG fits into the 1000em square?
Which dimensions will ensure the font can be used for print? I searched in the tutorial and here in the forum but can’t find the answer, hope you can help.
It should work the same way for the bigger sizes. From there you have to try and test.
And are you sure you need 7000 pixel. That would be almost 60cm at 300 dpi.
Thank you for clarifying, Georg
7000 was a stab in the dark…I guess that’s what I was searching for in the tutorial — a guideline of the best/minimum/maximum size for exporting an SBIX font to print successfully and retain sharpness. If I export a PNG as 3000px high, is the next step renaming the iColor layer 3000 to match?
And is it best practice to have a completely separate Glyphs file for printing, and a separate Glyphs file for digital 512-256-72?
or can they all be layered in one Glyphs file e.g iColor 3000, 1000, 512, 256, 72
There is no good way to subset the SBIX layers. So keeping them in two files is probably a good idea.
And as long as all images are just scaled versions of the same source, you can skip the smaller images. If you use the font for headlines, the rendering engine is most certainly fast enough to scale them down on the fly. So I could imagine that you have a 80–120px version (that would be good to render at 40–60px on retina screens). And one print version with 1000–3000px that would be good to print at 240–720pt (8.5cm–25.4cm). (the ranges are meant for you to pick one that suites your needs). For the print version, you can be generous as file size is not an issue. For screen/web you might need several versions depending on the use case.
