Hi everyone,
I am currently in the process of designing a braille font which aligns with the principles for accessiblity for where I am living. This font is supposed to be for internal usage only and is meant to speed up our workflow of designing as we often need to visually set short braille texts. At time beeing I deliberately ignore questions about correctly typesetting braille.
As we also often need to draw in scale the current version of the font is drawn in such way that arbitray setting text in 20pt results in correct physical dimensions. The horizontal size is no problem. But I am struggling with the correct vertical size.
Currently I have to manually set the leading to be a number with many decimal points to get the correct distance between lines. Playing around with different heights of my em apparently made no difference to Illustrator. I would like to find a solution which lets us input an integer value which is easy to remember.
I read through the vertical metrics tutorial but it resulted in a dead end for me. Any help is much appreciated!
How did the vertical metrics tutorial end up in a dead end? That’s exactly where the pertinent information is. What did you try and how did you test it?
Hi Sebastian, I try to outline what I tried so far:
setting different values for capheight in the font info under metrics = seemingly no different behaviour for the calculation of the leading in Illustrator
played around with top and bottom sidebearings, but I am not even sure if this is anyway near the correct solution
Maybe I missunderstood something in the first steps. Upon skimming through the forum I read that the Adobe applications have quirky ways of calculating things, but I cannot remember which thread it was. It’s been a few days since then.
Yes, the vertical metrics custom parameters are what you are looking for. How did you test them? Beware of font cache issues, there’s a tutorial on avoiding those as well.
Don’t change your cap height or other metrics. Those are purely for your design. Control the vertical metrics with the custom parameters.
What do you mean by “top and bottom side bearings”?
I suggest you take the reference font you have and simply copy its vertical metrics parameters. You can find its hhea/typo values if you drop it onto, for example, fontgauntlet.com and display the font info.
Where are you doing that – in the font settings in Glyphs, or in Character panel in Illustrator?
By default, Illustrator (and others Adobe apps, I suppose) set up the leading to 120% of UPM for all fonts. That is, you do not see the real vertical metrics specified in the font.
As explained in the tutorial, Illustrator has a setting for how the first baseline position is calculated. The default method is to measure the lowercase d. Subsequent line distances are determined by the user, not the font.
Hi everyone,
first, thanks for alle the answers. After reading your replys and another read of the vertical metrics tutorial I think that, what I want to achieve, is not easily done (probably not even possible) within any settings of the font.
My thought was, when I am able to achieve that text displayed in 24pt corresponds to a real world dimension, there must be a way to link (arrbitrary choosen) 24pt leading to match up with the needed real world dimension. And that’s were my fault lies:
24pt leading set in Illustrator is 24pt real world distance … whatever the font size is.
I am refering to this information. But it applies to top to bottom scripts. Which is not what I am looking for and again my fault of playing around with to many settings before reading what they are used for.
If you need to synchronize a print size with a screen size (that may differ from screen to screen), take a look at this settings in Illustrator which I marked with red color. You need to turn it on. This way 100% zoom should be close to real world dimensions.
