How to access and use glyphs in Silhouette Studio so that you can create custom designs with extra swirls, swashes, and extra special touches!
This post was created in partnership with The Hungry Jpeg. Our absolute favorite place to get fonts!
If you have ever bought a font with tons of gorgeous swirls and swashes cascading from the letters, only to download it, open up Silhouette Studio and start typing, only to reveal plain boring writing with none of those extra special touches that you saw on the advertisement, then you are in the right place!
Today we are going to talk all about glyphs, what they are, and how to use them. The good news is that even though it sounds all complicated and fancy it is really VERY simple to do!
What are Glyphs
Glyphs are most simply the extra characters that a font designer includes in the font that can’t be accessed with the regular keyboard. Usually you will need an advanced design software like Adobe Illustrator to access them, but there is a work around for some fonts in Silhouette Studio.
Many times I am asked why anyone would pay for fonts when there are so many free ones available. I have a whole post about free and cheap fonts here, but one BIG reason is that when you buy a font you are getting a pro-grade product that often times comes with extras like glyphs.
Not all fonts come with glyphs, and more importantly, not all fonts with glyphs are compatible with Silhouette Studio. So how do you know which are? One reason we partner with The Hungry Jpeg, and get the font bundle ourselves almost every month is that they work with the designers to make almost all of the fonts compatible with Silhouette Studio, and are generally very clear on which fonts will work. The font needs to be coded a certain way to be compatible and you want to look for the terminology PUA Encoded, or 100% accessible. These terms tell you that you can use the glyphs in Silhouette Studio.
Another note is that if you are running Silhouette Software V2 you will need the Designer Edition software to do this. Most users are on the current version, V3 which you can use the basic or upgraded versions to add glyphs. If you aren’t on V3 you can update your software for free to gain this functionality.
How to add Glyphs in Silhouette Studio
To begin, type the desired text in Silhouette Studio in the default font. Then highlight the whole thing and change it to your desired font. To change the font you will need it to have a green bounding box, not the black bounding box. For this tutorial I used one of my new favorites, Shanhie from The Hungry Jpeg January Bundle.
Once the font is changed:
On Mac:
- Open Font Book- You can use the search bar in launch pad to find it.
- Find your font- Use the search box or scroll to find. Also, make sure the font book is in grid mode.
- Scroll down to see all of the available characters for the font.
- Select the glyph (fancy character) you want to use and use command+c to copy it
- Go back to Silhouette Studio and highlight the letter you want to change, press command+v to paste the glyph in.
- Repeat for as many characters as desired.
Tip: Use command+z to go back if you decide you don’t love the way the character looks and want to try something else.
On a PC:
- Open Character Map- You can use the search bar in menu to find it.
- Change Character Set to Unicode
- Change Group by to Unicode Subrange
- In the selection box that appears select Private Characters
- Find your font- Use the search box or scroll to find.
- Scroll down to see all of the available characters for the font.
- Select the glyph (fancy character) you want to use and use control+c to copy it
- Go back to Silhouette Studio and highlight the letter you want to change, press control+v to paste the glyph in.
- Repeat for as many characters as desired.
If you want a full video tutorial on this for windows, I recommend this one!
Once you change out all of the characters you want, you can continue to cut as normal. How awesome was that!? You can completely customize your text with just a few clicks of a button.
As I mentioned in the video, we are huge fans of the Hungry Jpeg Font Bundles . The reason is that each bundle gives you a ton of fonts to play with, many of which include tons of swashes, swirls and extra characters for customizing your designs. Most of the bundles offer the fonts/graphics at 95-97% off their retail price. Pretty awesome! I would say it is the best kept secret in crafting, however, I am not really all that great at keeping it ha!
Let us know if you have any questions! We look forward to seeing you again for another tutorial or free cut file soon!