How do I generate a character exactly 10 mm square?

[Dexter Fox]

What setting would I need to generate a character exactly 10mm high by 10mm wide?

I've tried copying and pasting from Visio where I design my characters and it's about a 23 to 1 ratio out

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

10 mm = 28.34645669291339 points but setting the font size to 28 points in your applications won't result in letters that are 100 mm high.

FontCreator uses units call funits, with a default setting of 2048 funits per em.

You need to work backwards from the target application to decide what point size you will use for your 10 mm text. I would suggest that 36 point would be a convenient size to work with as most applications will have that size in the drop list used to select the font size.

My Balava font has a CapsHeight of 1577 funits at 2048 funits per em. That is close to 10 mm high at 36 point in my PagePlus DTP application as shown by the screen shot. My calculations indicate that you will need to design your font with a CapsHeight of 1613 funits to get 10 mm high capital glyphs for 36 point text. The Advance Width or Glyph width should also be 1613 funits (depending on what you mean by "10 mm wide").

10 mm High.png (16.33 KiB) Viewed 2039 times

If Visio can export your glyph designs as PDF files (one per file may be the easiest) then you can get a sharper and faster result with the import. The scale factor is set in Tools, Options, Glyph.

I have added a PDF of a table to calculate the height of glyphs and/or line-spacing at different point sizes. The line-spacing is the sum of Ascender, Descender, and line gap in Font Properties. A total of 2458 funits, for example, will give a default single line-spacing of 12 points for 10 point text.