Fiddle with Font Scaling?

1

This is a strange request. I am using an in house app. The programmer who made it sadly passed away. And the app has developed a weird bug, where it’ll block the exporting of any content if the text size isn’t set to 14pt. This is too large for my needs.

Is there anyway I can fiddle with the scaling of a font in Glyphs 3, so when I export a font and use it in the app, I can select 14pt in the app menu, but the font is actually only 13pt.

I know this isn’t best practice at all, but it’s a fringe situation. It’s only for 1 or 2 fonts, and it’ll be much easier than trying to fix the app (which doesn’t seem possible anyway, as I don’t think any of the source code is accessible. We’ll probably have to hire someone to write a new app, but that’s not an option in the immediate short term).

Thanks!

2

This is tricky, depending on what access you have to the font in question. If you have the original Glyphs file, that is of course the very best scenario.

In Glyphs, go to Font Info > Font. Set the value in the Units per Em field to 1077. Then click on the arrow icon next to it. A “Scale to UPM” window will pop up. Enter 1000 as the value and click OK. Glyphs will now scale all letters down to approximately 92.9% (13÷14). Re-export the font and you will find it to be a bit smaller now.

Good luck!

1 Like
3

Or just change the UPM without scaling. Increasing that will make the font look smaller.

1 Like
4

14/13≈1.077

If you change your Units per Em from 1000 to 1077, the font will appear with the size difference that changing from 14 to 13pt would have yielded.

1 Like
5

…that’s exactly what I wrote above :sweat_smile:

1 Like
6

(Ah sorry, true. I started writing when there was no answer yet and when I reopened the page on my phone, the posting dialog took up the whole screen.)

1 Like
7

Sebastian Carewe, Georg Seifert, Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer - Thanks for your help. It took a little trial and error with the UPM but it works perfectly. Thanks again!

8

A little follow-up on this.

Just to recap: I am using an in house app that has developed a weird bug, where it’ll block the exporting of any content if the text size isn’t set to 14pt. This is too large for my needs.

The suggestion given here was to fiddle with the UPM value of a font, which will adjust the scaling to allow a font to be set at 14pt, but be smaller than 14pt.

I am trying to use this approach on a font that is a bold font. But when I fiddle with the UPM for a bold font, it seems to have no affect. Is there a trick to making it work for bold fonts?

Thanks!

9

What do you mean, it has no effect? How are you testing this? It sounds like your Bold font is not actually being displayed. Meaning: This is most likely a font cache issue, or your style linking is not set up correctly. How are you editing the files exactly?