Crayon

buy: €5
drawing iPad copy-paste

by vB, B & B

version 2

Copy and paste glyph drawings and Space Centers to the clipboard.

Crayon

Crayon adds a 🖍️ menu item with tools to copy and paste glyph drawings and Space Centers to the clipboard as sketch-ready images for iPad apps like Procreate, Notability, Notes, and more.

Seamlessly copy and paste shapes to and from your iPad, to quickly draw on top of them or vectorize your drawings—a very tactile and fast way of working. Great for sketching and refining curves.

Note: Crayon does not perform any digitization or auto-tracing.

Prerequisites

  • iPad (preferably with Apple Pencil)
  • A drawing or annotation app on iPad, like Procreate, Notability or even iOS Notes.
  • You need to activate the Handoff feature for seamless copying and pasting between iPad and Mac. This needs to be switched on in MacOS settings as well as iOS settings. See how here.
  • On the iPad you also need to allow pasting from other apps. Look for this menu setting in iPad > Settings > [App Name (e.g. Procreate)] > Paste from Other Apps > Allow

Table of Contents

How to use

Here is a general guide on how to use Crayon. Details on specific functions are covered later.

From RoboFont to iPad

  • Copy your current glyph or Space Center layout to your clipboard using Crayon.
  • Open your iPad drawing app of choice and paste the drawing in.
  • Edit your drawing to your heart’s content. Avoid resizing the canvas.

From iPad to RoboFont

  • On your iPad, copy the drawing to your clipboard.
  • On RoboFont, use Crayon’s Paste button to import your drawing back into RoboFont. Crayon will know whether the image is from an individual glyph or a Space Center. If the latter, it will guide you in sending individual glyph drawings to the right place.

From anywhere else to RoboFont

  • Open Crayon’s Sketch Importer to import images of drawings that didn’t originate from Crayon.
  • In the Glyph Editor, draw lines along the baseline(s) of your sketch.
  • In Sketch Importer type the glyphs you see in your sketch. For more details, see Sketch Importer

Copy Glyph

Adds an image of the current glyph to the clipboard, with lines and margins, and the specified contextual niceties (see Settings).

Copy Space Center

Adds an image of the glyphs on display in the current Space Center to your clipboard. With lines and margins, and the specified contextual niceties (see Settings).

Paste

After fixing, sketching, redrawing, reimagining your glyph or Space Center in the iPad app of choice, copy the whole image on your iPad. Then, in RoboFont, select this Paste option to intelligently place your new sketch, well-positioned in the appropriate layer.

Your image should have some QR information embedded. Crayon will determine whether the pasted image is a glyph image or a Space Center image. If the former, Crayon will paste the image in your current glyph. If the latter, a multi-glyph paste window will pop-up…

Multi-Glyph Paste

This window offers a preview of the Space Center sketch you’ve copied from the iPad, and a list of glyph names that are in your sketch. You can select one or more them to import as images into your current UFO. Each glyph will be automatically cropped and positioned in the appropriate glyph.

Sketch Importer

Sketch Importer is a bonus tool for importing raw sketches, reference scans, or any kind of image that did not start in Crayon.

  1. On the iPad, copy your image to the clipboard.
  2. In RoboFont, select Sketch Importer from the Crayon menu to to paste the image into the current glyph.
    • It is okay for the image to be pasted before opening Sketch Importer. It will use what’s there.
    • It is also okay for the image to not be in your clipboard. If nothing is in your clipboard, Sketch Importer will open a file browser to help input your sketch image.
  3. In the Sketch Importer text field, type the content of your sketch.
    • Spaces represent skipped line segments within the same contour.
    • Line breaks represent skipping to the next contour of line segments.
  4. Using the draw tool, draw a segment for each glyph, along its baseline.
    • The first and second point of each segment represents that glyph’s sidebearings.
    • Change the contour’s direction to denote drawings that are flipped upside down.
  5. Choose the most appropriate dimension for your sketch (x-height, cap-height, etc.), and adjust the slider until it looks good.
    • Exceptions for individual glyphs may be added by selecting a line segment, pressing (+) below the height exception table, and adjusting the resulting slider.
  6. Click Import, and your sketches will be automatically distributed throughout the font.

Clear Images in Glyph

Removes all images from all layers in your current glyph. You might have a copy left on your iPad, otherwise: gone.

Settings

Layer Name: the name of the layer the glyph image will be pasted into. Default is ‘crayon’.

Note: Changing the layer name in Settings will not affect existing layers.

Image Margin: the size of the margin that Crayon adds around the glyph body. Increase the margin to allow for shapes that are beyond the glyph’s margin, ascender, or descender. Measured in em units.

Image Opacity: the desired opacity for the image pasted in the layer. Default is 100, because RoboFont natively fades background layers a bit already. Measured in %.

Show: optional lines you can add to the exported glyph images. Such as there are: Spacing Marks (+), Baseline, Sidebearings, Dimensions, Local Guides, Global Guides, Glyph Names.

Note

Crayon places a QR code in each corner of the image. These codes contain positioning information and the name of the glyph. Crayon needs this information to put your edited drawing in the right place when you paste it back into RoboFont. If possible, try to leave these QR codes intact. It is not a URL or a phone number. Although it would be interesting to hear who answers.

Made by Ryan Bugden, Erik van Blokland, Frederik Berlaen.