Fonts that work well in VideoScribe

  • We have a new instant answer called Font Kerning which describes the way that VideoScribe handles fonts and which types of fonts are best to use.


    If you use any fonts in your scribes that you think work particularly well please share them with the VideoScribe community by adding the name of the font to this topic.


    2 people have this question
  • Personally I go for hand drawn looking fonts or I hand draw the fonts in my SVGs but I have also found that monospace fonts seem to work well (they usually have mono in the font name).


     For anyone unfamiliar with monospace fonts, I believe that each letter takes up the same width as every other letter, and that seems to work well in videoscribe.


    Lots of them available.


    -Mike (videoscribe user)


  • The problem is that VS strips out the Left and Right Bearing Distances of the characters and substitutes it's own distance. I've calculated this at a factor of .0365 of the height. This is much too small as standard fonts such as Arial use a larger distance.

    The other issue how VS changes the width of thin characters ("i" and "l") and makes them even thinner. 

    These two factors make standard fonts such as Arial look bad. (Look at the lowercase I in the example "A bit better" show above). Why???

    My solution has been to work with creating custom fonts which overcome some of these issue - for now - until they get fixed. (I have surmised that much of the problem comes from VS need to rasterize characters as they are displayed which requires that they kerning causes the characters to overlap.).

    Shown below is a possible workaround from VS's handling of common fonts. I've edit a version of Arial so that the think characters has a slight serif which moves then away from neighboring characters with and similar distance of the original non-VS adjusted font. 

    image

    More tweaks need to be done for this customization to look "usable".

    Font designers spend hundreds of hours getting the space before and after each glyph "perfect". VideoScribe needs to maintain these distances (and the basic shape of they glyphs) to look correct. 

    Dave Edwards

  • Thanks David,


    As well as a lack of kerning, there are other issues with fonts such as the display of lowercase l and i on sans-serif fonts. These issues will be resolved when the font system is revised. If you do need to use a proportional font, a serif-font is recommended as the issue with the display of these characters is better than that of a proportional sans-serif font.

  • I did mention the further thinning of the thin character in my post (odd problem). For now I like the look of the monospaced fonts. I'm really liking "Consolas"...

    image

    However (on a related note) - you cannot load into VS one of the other members of a Font Family (e.g. Bold or Italic) - you have to edit the Family member and give it a unique name.


  • Yes, it does seem that on Windows systems, the software does not recognise italics or bold versions of the fonts, however it seems to recognise the variants on Mac systems. Our developers are aware of this issue and will be looking into this in future.

  • Thanks for the reply - I'm glad they're on top of it. Many of the overall issues with VS is it's conversion of EVERYTHING including text to raster. Font glyphs are converted to raster and revealed with a calculated "stroke" as are SVGs. To leap ahead all these other systems and at the same time allow for font kerning, vectors need to stay as vectors. Everything, including HTML5, is going to vector graphics processing because of the resolution and file size reduction.

  • jhonatan

  • Hi. 
    I have a question about fonts.
    I live in Korea and I am going to use your product. 
    However, there is a Korean list of supported fonts, but even if you download them, they do not appear to be displayed in the actual editing window. Tell me how to solve it. I'd appreciate it if you could let me know if there's any support.

  • Hello, the Korean alphabet (Hangul) is not supported in VideoScribe. We have more about this and some alternative options to using the text input on our Write with non-Western text characters help page


  • Good information sir
  • In January 2018 Matthew Cook wrote "As well as a lack of kerning, there are other issues with fonts such as the display of lowercase l and i on sans-serif fonts. These issues will be resolved when the font system is revised." 


    Any update on this? Timeframe? This decade perhaps?!!

  • I can say that no work is currently being carried out regarding fonts. We do have some tasks planned for improvements in this area but these have not yet been given a development timescale.

  • I have to admit that's really, really sad. Because of this you see a lot of video with same crappy default font. You can always tell a VS video because of this. Text is a big issue for me and because of this lack of support, I've dropped by subscription to VideoScribe.

  • Different fonts are supported. You can import any font into VideoScribe that is installed on your computer. However, at the moment, monospaced fonts tend to look better in VideoScribe when compared to proportional fonts.


    Import fonts.