I thought I worked this out before, but PagePlus is no longer using the right line spacing values for my latest fonts. Pali works as expected, but Garava does not. This is not a change in PagePlus X5 — PagePlus X4 has the same problem.
I noticed this option on the FontCreator metrics dialogue: Use typo metrics for line spacing but its always greyed out and disabled, so why is it there? I think I don’t want to use it — I keep my glyphs strictly within the limits of WinAscent and WinDescent.
If set, it is strongly recommended to use Typo Ascender - Typo Descender + Typo Line Gap as a value for default line spacing for this font.
These are the line spacing and WinAscent/WinDescent Values of Pali and Garava.
Garava Bold.7z (159 KB)
Garava Regular.7z (162 KB)
It will only be enabled if you set the Content and Layout version (available in the Header page) to Version 4. I don’t think this has anything to do with your mentioned problem, but unfortunately I don’t not what is causing the issue.
Thanks. That highlights a problem with the dialogue using my 10 pt Verdana system font. Its very easy to enable the checkbox when trying to click the Maximum radio button. There is some room to move the checkbox down a few pixels.
I will continue searching for the answer to the line-spacing problem. It is critical as it could affect the pagination of all old documents. Nowadays, I tend to use percentage of pointsize line-spacing, which avoids that problem, but its not the default setting in PagePlus, so other documents and most users will surely be affected by this if they install the updated font.
I confirmed that it is not due to patches or updates in PagePlus. PagePlus 9 also spaces 10 point Garava at 12.026 points instead of the expected 12.002 points.
A value of 1996 for the WinAscent with -467 for WinDescent would be expected to give the result of 12.026 points.
By trial and error I found that a value of 1991 for WinAscent and -466 for WinDescent (total 2,457) gives the result that I want, but why is still a mystery to me. Maybe a long standing bug with rounding errors in PagePlus.
A difference of 0.026 points may seem insignificant, but it can make the difference of 1 fewer lines on a page, which will break the pagination on old documents when installing the updated font. Minor reductions in advance width or kerning values are much less likely to cause such problems, though they can sometimes break the layout.
With my Talapanna font, I enabled Content and layout version 4, checked the flag to use Typo metrics, and saved the font.
However, the flag is unchecked on reopening the metrics dialogue, which seems to be a bug.
Talapanna TTF.7z (324 KB)
That is indeed a bug. We’ve just fixed it in FontCreator version 6.2.0.244, so use the update feature to get this latest release.
That fixes the check-box, but unfortunately it doesn’t affect the line-spacing in PagePlus, Oo Writer, or Wordpad. Nor does it change the line spacing in the Font Test window.
Unfortunately we don’t know how an O.S. calculates line spacing. And even then it is eventually up to the software to decide what value to use. This topic (I’m not sure if it is still up to date) might give you some more insight, and might lead to a solution:
Vertical Metrics How-To