Up to now I have always set bearings by eye.
Now I am investigating the Transform Wizard to get a bit more precision.
I selected a few glyphs that all need to have the same spacing on the left - actually they are
to overlap with character to their left, the open the Wizard and make a script;
Left Side bearing at x=0
Bearings LS:-200
The effect of this is to position the left most control point at -200 when what I wanted
was to position the leftmost edge of the glyph contour at -200?
Does this mean that the leftmost control point must be on the contour?
Is there any way to get the Wizard to use Bounding Box values instead?
Mike
If I understand you correctly, then your glyph has some off-curve extremes. Fix them first with the Validation Toolbar and then the left-most control point will coincide with the left of the contour.
I think the left side bearing is relative to the “left side” of the glyph so if you specify that to be -200, for example, that will effectively move the character to the left 200 funits closer (the overlap). So if you set Bearings LS: -200 RS: 50 you’ll end up with 50 units of white to the right and -200 to the left.
I always want my glyphs to align at 0 - but don’t know any way to automate that one, but this realignment of the bearings makes it appear to work.
Bhikkhu,
I use as few points as possible placed exactly the way to ‘construct’ the right shape.
Using Validation Tool makes a real mess by adding far too many points in a messy way.
True the contour remains ok but I can no longer arrange the points based on simple geometry.
I don’t care if the points are extremes providing the contour is computed well.
What I’m saying is that the extreme left of the glyph must be a point on the contour, not
a point which is off curve. Surely the left and right sides for the bounding box should be used.
Mike
I too like to use as few points as possible, but our computers have rules they must adhere to.
With fonts, screens must be told which pixels to turn on and off. Printers need to know where to place ink and where to stop. When they get equivocal information . . .
The B-Box for EACH contour (Internal and external) is established by the outermost on-contour point for top, bottom, left, and right.
Any off-contour point beyond the B-Box is a problem, interpreted one way by some appliances, and another by others.
Way back when I first wrote Circle Secrets I didn’t understand this.
I actually made fonts with internal contours with NO on-contour points because I was using Tools / Options / Validation /Global detection - instead of Local Detection. I thought everything was fine.