Diagonal guide lines

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phb
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Diagonal guide lines

Post by phb »

This is a partial solution to the problem of providing guide lines for diagonals.

Select a Glyph that you're not going to use and draw one or more thin, diagonal contours.

I usually start with a 45º and a 60º of 10 units width.

Don't make the mistake that I did of reducing them to zero width. You get a nice fine line but you can't select it!

These can then be copied and pasted into other glyphs, rotated to suit and used to line up the sections and then deleted.

I keep a working font which has them stored in it for copying into any new font as required.

Whilst this works, it's not a useful as guides would be, as you have to leave the dummy contour a little off-line in order to be able to move the points on the line.
Bhikkhu Pesala
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Diagonal Guidelines

Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

:idea: Draw a contour with just four points:- a slash with a triangle at the bottom. Then you can select it by clicking on the triangle at the bottom (or at the top if you prefer).
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Jowaco
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Post by Jowaco »

Bhikkhu,
What an excellent hint. I have deloped this a bit. Make a triangle at the bottom, below the descender boundary:
Put a point. Go left using Ctrl. Put a point. Go down using Ctrl. Put a point. Go exactly to the first point. Put another point. Go to the top, above the ascender boundary at an angle you desire. Put a point and Apply. Afterwards, in point mode the top point can be moved to a new angle as required. I envisage using this to produce ligatures in a cursive, hand-written font.
Thanks,
Joe.
Jowaco
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Post by Jowaco »

Bhikkhu,
This is the position in which I finally ended up. If this is placed in the samples file it can be dragged into any Edit window and indeed it can be copied and pasted to obtain a second guide line with another slope. Works well.
Thanks again,
Joe.
Image
Bhikkhu Pesala
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Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

The above tips are obsolete now that we have an option for diagonal guidelines in Font Creator.

To get a diagonal guideline at the correct angle for italic fonts you can drag a vertical guideline, then rotate it using the shift key, or double-click on the guideline to set the angle, which you can find on the Post tab of Format, Settings. To check that the italic angle is correct, or to find it for a font you have created, select two nodes on the square bracket, press "G" to create a diagonal guideline through them both, double-click the guideline, check Diagonal - Angle, and read off the angle.

Image

Here the angle is 262° which you subtract from 270° to get 8° so the Italic Angle on the Post tab should be -8. The Italic Angle is used by Windows to slant the text cursor in italic text. If your font is a script font, which is slanted, but regular not italic, you can temporarily change it to italic on the Metrics tab, enter an italic angle on the Post tab, and calculate the caret rise and run on the General tab. If any font has an italic angle, but the caret run is zero, the text cursor will be vertical.
Last edited by Bhikkhu Pesala on Mon Jul 11, 2005 11:36 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Dave Crosby
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Thanks!

Post by Dave Crosby »

Great Update!
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