Scaling the font

Glyphs
1

Hey Georg & all,
what would be the best way to rescale a font.
My current font’s x height needs to be bigger in comparison to similar fonts. But I’m pretty far ahead in the process, so it’d be good if I didn’t need to rescale them and then adjust anchors, etc.
Is there a simple way to do this?
Best
Rodrigo

2

Hi Rodrigo,

You can scale font to new upm in the font info window by clicking the double-arrow-button and then change back the upm without scaling

3

Perhaps, to avoid the summing up of rounding errors, it’s best to use a custom parameter. Take a look at ‘scale to UPM’ in the instance parameters.

4

Thanks Mekka and sylvain, I’ll try that.
As for rounding errors, does it help if I set the grid to 0?

5

Only do that if you have a special need for extra precision.

6

So when I do this, Ascender + Descender values don’t add up to 1000 which I have read as being “right”. Is this a big issue?

I’m trying sylvain’s suggestion in this case: scaling UPM, then scaling back to 1000.

7

I’ve tried both suggestions and Sylvain’s seems more appropriate. Scaling to UPM adjusts the Cap/X-height to the desired value.
Setting UPM back to 1000 without scaling then makes it look the size I need it to be in the applications.

Now, I’ve tried doing it using custom paramaters both in the font tab (setting custom property upm to 1000) and the instance tab (setting scaleToUPM to 1180, 18% larger), but it doesn’t work like that. Any thoughts on how to do it through custom parameters?
Cheers
Rodrigo

8

The custom parameter is only useful to change the UPM in a Multiple Master for a certain instance (if you want to converter it to TTF later). For your case the method of Sylvain is what you need.

9

Thanks Georg.
What about the sum of ascender+ descender value after the scale? How does it affect the output?

10

The ascender/descender define the line spacing.