I am very much a beginner at font design and I am using Glyphs 2 to create fonts for (fictional) constructed writing systems. One of the fonts I am making appears somewhat smaller than Latin fonts at 12pts in Word. Many of the letters have an x-height of 300 (the letters in this writing system have more variable heights than Latin script), so naturally they appear smaller. Is there a way to scale up the entire font, so it appears larger at 12pts? I currently have to set it to 16-18pts to be easily readable.
I have tried scaling to 500 UPM using the ‘scale font to new UPM’ button, the setting it back to 1000, but for some reason this makes the font appear even smaller in Word? When I do this, the ‘background’ images of the Latin letters become bigger, but the glyphs I drew do not. Do I need to alter the metrics after/before scaling? Apologies if this seems like a redundant question. Any advice would be appreciated.
To find the right size, you can reduce the UPM (units per Em) value in Font Info > Font. When you are happy with the size, you can either just leave it like that or scale the whole font back to a UPM of 1000 with the button next to the UPM field.
This scaling technic works perfectly for the outlines. What about the Metrics and Kerning values? Do they get changed automatically in proportion to the scale? Or extra Metrics and Kerning work is needed after?
Technically, by changing the UPM value (e.g. from 1000 to 900), it is only the meaning of ‘one unit’ that gets changed (from 1/1000 to 1/900 in this example), everything else stays the same. So the kerning and metric values already are OK.
That is, unless you actually do use the scale button (but you do not need to!), then all values will be scaled accordingly, with the necessary rounding and the unavoidable small rounding errors that come with it. However, a UPM with an unorthodox value is completely OK.