Line height determined by the glyph shape of Agrave (at least in Apple apps)

I am not sure if this is just a quirk of Apple’s rasterizer that Glyphs cannot do anything about, but when I try to adjust vertical metrics by setting custom parameters like typoAscender, it is ignored at least on Apple apps (like Font Book and TextEdit, on OS X 10.11.6) and the line gap becomes larger. I noticed that the presence of, and the shape of the glyph Agrave affect this. The attached file shows this phenomenon.

LineHeightTest.zip (19.0 KB)

If the actual glyph shape of Agrave extends above the ascender height, that height overrides the vertical metrics, it seems. In the attached Glyphs file, if you swap the glyphs Agrave and Agrave.001, latter being shorter, the line gap gets smaller. Other glyphs like Aacute don’t show this kind of effect.

In FontTableViewer, the vertical metrics look fine. I do not have other rasterizers to test such as Adobe apps.

My current workaround to this is to make the default glyph for Agrave (U+00C0) short, cutting off the extending part of the diacritic, and use the calt feature to always replace it with a more properly designed glyph. Is there any way to fundamentally solve this problem?

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I just experienced this issue with a font in Sketch. I guess the solution is to either change the metrics or change the shape/height of the grave (and consecutively the acute).

I just ran into this same issue. I’m using Glyphs Mini, where there is much less control over customizing things. I haven’t been able to find a solution to fix this short of not including those two glyphs, but that doesn’t seem right.

I seem to have this issue on both Agrave or Aacute. Does anyone know of a solve for this in Glyphs Mini, or is this going to require @sayunu’s work around to make right?

hheaAscender has an influence on the first baseline offset in Mac Office apps. I don’t know about Sketch.

I cannot exclude that some apps measure certain glyphs. But in that case, you cannot do much from within the font other than change those glyphs.

I built the font in Glyphs Mini 2.0.1, but have an older copy of Glyphs (1.4.4). I brought the font from Mini into old Glyphs, added a custom hheaAscender value, exported things and that seemed to fix it. @mekkablue — is adding that custom value ONLY available in Glyphs proper?

Yes custom parameters are only available in the ‘full’ Glyphs.

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