Symbol design: Draw a long diagonal line

[dust]

Hi,

I want to create a symbol. It should be like a long "less than" (<) or "greater than" (>) symbol. Here is the picture: Long 'less than' symbol

image.png (68.85 KiB) Viewed 4436 times

The result is not good. The outline became 'zig-zag' (nozzle) and the line does not smooth when we draw a long diagonal line shape.

Is there a way to achieve this with Font Creator?

Thanks!

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Although fonts are vectors, monitors are only pixels. The end result will depend on the font size, windows font smoothing, and character hinting.

You could using a higher funits/em value, but I doubt if that will make any difference to the rendered font in Windows applications. Any glyph is only ever going to be rendered as a bitmap on a screen or printer.

[dust]

Hi,

thanks, Bhikkhu. Where I should try to change the unit, in the Font Creator software?

[Erwin Denissen]

Open the glyph in FontCreator and in the Glyph Edit window do inspect the outline in point mode to ensure it doesn't include excessive points.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

The funits per em setting is found in Font, Properties, General (in FontCreator 9.1)

The default of 2048 is adequate for most fonts. A higher value may benefit fonts with fine details like Gabriola (which uses 4096 funits/em) as it gives the designer more node positions to use. Fonts with more than 4096 funits/em are rare. Mac fonts use 1000 funits/em for some unknown reason, but computers like binary numbers.

funits per em.png (23.12 KiB) Viewed 4418 times

[Alfred]

Mac fonts use 1000 funits/em for some unknown reason, but computers like binary numbers.

PostScript Type 1 fonts must have a UPM value of 1000, but OpenType fonts (with or without PS outlines) can use a value of 1024 or 2048, or even more if you're working with very complex glyphs and you want to avoid rounding errors. Although integer powers of 2 are more efficient, I don't think that's an issue with any modern PC; it may have mattered back in the days of CPU clock speeds measured in tens of megahertz, with RAM sizes in single-digit megabytes, but nowadays you should be able to use a UPM value of 1348, or 3333, or whatever you want. Having said that, there are probably still some major applications out there which will misbehave if you throw odd UPM values at them, so it's probably best to stick to the standard values.

[Erwin Denissen]

Microsoft has always recommended to use 2048 units per em.

Now even Apples uses this upem for their new system font known as San Francisco. Those are OpenType fonts with CFF based outlines.

[dust]

Hi,

I haven't got any luck with the diagonal lines. I should keep it short.

Thanks for the answers!