I’m at the start of the process of beginning to create my first font.
My question is about generating letterforms in Illustrator for export to Glyphs. More specifically about setting up the grid to control the vertical and horizontal metrics.
I’ve called up the help files for Glyphs and it advises that you should draw a rectangle in Glyphs, then copy and paste this into Illustrator to get a square the right size.
The thing is I’m not quite sure about this because ideally I want to set up the font’s individual letters onto either A4 or A3 pages.
What is the optimum size for the font to be set up to in mm, (essentially the cap height in mm)?
Don’t work in millimeters, but in points: “One point in Illustrator correspond with units in Glyphs. So something that is 1000 pt high will end up 1000 units height in Glyphs”.
What I use(d) to do is to start with an Illustrator file who is 1000 pt height. I don’t really mind about caps height. What is important is that both ascender and descender are within the 1000 points bounds.
My advice: Don’t draw your letters in Illustrator. Seriously. There are just too many drawbacks. It’s better to do the whole job in Glyphs from the start. My experience is that you just end up doing everything twice because AI’s tools are too imprecise.
If you select a zero grid in font info before you start drawing you are fine. Otherwise you get small rounding errors depending on the amount of scaling. The image should not be completely off scale, through.