Size of Letter Grid in Illustrator

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.

Like this:

http://yfrog.com/oc2zbp

The red line is 1000 pt height.

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.

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Is there any possibility to place an image (as template) for drawing a glyph? So I can kick Illustrator …

Just drag the image in the edit view or use Layer > Add image…

If you set the measurement units to points in Photoshop, you can scale the images to the right size. In point in Photoshop is one font unit in Glyphs.

Thank you!

One question, is it a problem to scale the glyph/paths after drawing or should I better scale my scan before?

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.

Absolutely clear now.