When designing a font, the bottoms of my y, p, g, and q glyphs are cut off unless I move the entire charecter up. This creates a problem becaue the tops of the charecter is now too high.
Can I lower the location of the solid black line (which I believe represents the lower limit of the glyph? Adjusting the glyph itself would be a way around this problem, but it effects the overall appeal of the font.
Thanks for entertaining all my novice questions!
Around the glyph there are four lines that represent the Bearings. These are shown by default but you can hide them through the “Show Bearings” button on the drawing toolbar.
The left and right bearings can be changed by dragging them to their desired position. You could also adjust the bearings when you right click a glyph in the overview window and select “Properties…”. Here you can alter the left side bearing and the advance width.
As you already noticed, everything above the top and below the bottom line will be clipped. To change the top and bottom metrics; select Settings from the Format menu to open the Font Settings window and select the Windows page. Here you can change the Win Ascent (Top) and Win Descent (Bottom). You should also update the Typo Ascender and Typo Descender on the Windows tab and the ascender and descender located on the Header tab.
In Format->Tables you might have to remove the VDMX table. If Windows does not locate this table in a font, it will calculate those values itself. This will take some extra milliseconds the first time it is loaded into the rasterizer. I don’t think we should worry about that.
To regenerate this table you could use a utility from Microsoft called CacheTT, located at:
CacheTT is a utility to enable the modification of TrueType and TrueType Open files. Modifications include creation/ modification of one or more of the tables VDMX, hdmx and LTSH by calculating and caching values obtained from the Rasterizer. The resulting font is a complete and correct font.
Thank you very much for your help. This is by far the most useful forum that I have ever used!!!