When I bring letters that I drew in Illustrator into Glyphs, the paths are often not well organized.
I’m curious — what kind of problems can occur if I don’t clean up or optimize the paths?
Is there a rendering issue or something similar that can happen if the paths aren’t cleaned up properly?
They will look bad (like they do in Illustrator). You also waste file size.
Can you show an example of your outlines?
Illustrator is an image drawing tool, not a type design tool. While a letterform drawn in Illustrator can look fine at your screen size, and work well enough for illustration purposes, the strain it is put under at 8pt size and at the limitations imposed in a font, the odds are that it will not survive well in that context. Most graphic designers are familiar with Illustrator and own it already. They may, at some point, get interested in type design and start by using their familiar tool, Illustrator, to begin their voyage into type design. I was one of them. Well enough, but, at the point when they commit themselves to type design, it is time to use the best tools for the job. That means, put away Illustrator (for type design) and escape all the headaches that it brings.
The truth is, when doing graphic design tasks like logo design, I now do my drawing in Glyphs and then paste the final drawing back into Illustrator or place into InDesign for layout.
Hello,
This is a good star point.
Cheers,
Edu
The best thing about Illustrator as regards type design is that if you are well-versed in using Illustrator already, the transition to using Glyphs is virtually seamless insofar as drawing goes, except Glyphs is far superior to Illustrator.
“Optimized” paths are basically the easiest way to draw good-looking shapes with less work. When you diverge from that, you just create yourself more work and more problems.
There is a technical part:
The text-renderers have certain assumptions about the structure of the paths (e.g. path direction and (relevant) extreme points). This can lead to rendering artifacts some environments.
And if you have too many points, the file size will increase, the rendering performance might be poor and if you have many nodes and many glyphs, it might not fit into a font.
And as always, You need to test a lot (in different browsers on different platforms) and all kinds of app (e.g. Office, Adobe).
And a practical one:
Editing those complex outlines is can be difficult. Type designers like clean outlines because that makes it easer to get consistent shapes.