Checkbox suggestion for swash tails for g and y and Q etc

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William
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Checkbox suggestion for swash tails for g and y and Q etc

Post by William »

Could you please consider adding a checkbox to the font-producing section of Scanahand so as to provide a user-chooseable option in producing the font as follows.

If the checkbox is checked, then, just for the purposes of calculating the side-bearings of each glyph and the width of the space character, Scanahand does not take into account the x coordinate of any point for which the y coordinate is lower than a particular number of font units below the baseline. The particular number would be found in a textbox displayed next to the checkbox, the default value being something like -50.

This would have the advantage that sweeping tails could be added to characters such as g and y and Q without needing to use FontCreator to adjust the font after it has been produced.

William Overington

6 November 2008
William
Top Typographer
Top Typographer
Posts: 2038
Joined: Tue Sep 14, 2004 6:41 pm
Location: Worcestershire, England
Contact:

Re: Checkbox suggestion for swash tails for g and y and Q et

Post by William »

Could you please consider extending the above request as follows please.

If the checkbox is checked, then, just for the purposes of calculating the side-bearings of each glyph and the width of the space character, Scanahand does not take into account

the x coordinate of any point for which the y coordinate is lower than a particular number of font units below the baseline,

nor

the x coordinate of any point for which the y coordinate is higher than a particular number of font units above the x-height. The particular numbers would be found in two textboxes displayed next to the checkbox.

This first case would have the advantage that glyphs for sweeping-tail calligraphic g and calligraphic y and calligraphic Q could be added into the Private Use Area using a suitable template without needing to use FontCreator to adjust the font after it has been produced.

The second case would have the advantage that glyphs for forward-sweeping calligraphic h and backward-sweeping calligraphic d could be added into the Private Use Area using a suitable template without needing to use FontCreator to adjust the font after it has been produced.

The advantage would be that, given the following set of items that could be produced, a straightforward route from hand-drawn characters to an OpenType font would thus be made available.

1. A custom Scanahand template.

2. A pdf document, or some other document, showing the layout of cell assignments on those pages of the above custom template where use of Private Use Area assignments results in black rectangles being printed on the template rather than a glyph of a recognizable character being printed.

3. A text file that contains text to copy and paste into the OpenType Layout Feature Editor of FontCreator 7 so that a font produced using Scanahand with the above custom template could be straightforwardly used to produce an OpenType font without the need to adjust the bearings of any individual glyphs.

William Overington

8 May 2013
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