Help : Introducing Expert Mode

Switch to Expert Mode

 

Expert Mode

To keep FontStruct nice and simple for beginners and minimalists, but also powerful and feature-rich for more advanced users, many advanced features are available in a special editing mode called “Expert Mode”. To go in and out of Expert Mode, just press the Expert Mode button. 

Once you are in Expert Mode, new items appear in the menu and a number of extra features such as “brick-stacking” and “composite bricks” are activated.

Some new items appear in the "View" menu for example: 

View Menu: Minimal Mode 

If you really know your keyboard shortcuts, and you don’t need to add any more bricks, you may well want to switch to minimal mode. In this mode, almost all panels disappear from the screen. No distractions, it’s just you and the grid. 

View Menu: Outline Mode

Choose this option if you want to see your bricks drawn with outlines rather than a fill. This can be useful if you are working with filters, stacks and composites - to see where they overlap.

There's also a whole new “Advanced” submenu:

New Advanced Menu

 

Unicode Support

Selecting the “Unicode Letter Sets” menu item allows you to use unicode character sets instead of the standard FontStruct character sets. This means that you can create many thousands of different glyphs for diverse writing systems. Note that not all unicode slots are available however. In Expert Mode, unicode codepoints are also shown in the “Current Letter” palette, and when rolling over letters in the character selector at the bottom of the screen.

Lock Guides

Guidelines are great, but they can get in the way of drawing sometimes. Using this menu item, you can now lock the guides so they are visible but cannot be dragged. The locking applies to all guides, including the letter-width adjuster.

Read about more Expert Mode features:

Brick Stacking and Composite Bricks

Commands

Extra Extra Guides

 

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