Glyphs Bearing Left

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1

I’ve been analyzing some Symbol fonts where some wide glyphs have been aligned at very negative numbers (e.g., -1200,-2000). When displayed they are truncated on the right. Why does this happen?

The Glyphs are not too wide, but are only sitting too far to the left. (The fonts were built with Font Creator so there is a valid connection.)

My clean up process is to try to use the Glyph Transformer “Left Side Bearing Point at x=0”. If the glyph is clean with no edit errors, the Glyph Transformer works well. Too often it cannot be used as this function (not nicely) Validates the font points which often times turns “my white circles black”. Too often clean up is hairy on these fonts so I have to move the glyphs manually.

I don’t move the Left Side Bearing so I end up with some glyphs with LSB and some without.

So now at the beginning, I set Autometrics to 0 so that GT aligns the glyph at zero and ignores any left side bearing value which it says it is going to move too… I run the GT or move the glyphs manually and then run Autometrics again to get a common Left Side Bearing value. Having a standard left side bearing generally works correctly on symbol-style characters.

Since my final product appears to be correct, is everything fine with the steps I go through? Is there an easier way? How did they get so far left in the first place where they wouldn’t work anymore? (Sounds political doesn’t it!).

Dick Pape

2

Because Windows displays glyphs best when they have their “Left Side Bearing Point at x=0”, I added that feature to Font Creator 5.0. I don’t know why this is so important for Windows rasterizer, but it seems to solve a lot of display problems.

Do send the font file to me so I can look into the this.

3

Before the Transform wizard starts a script, it first prepares the glyphs. This is sometimes necessary, but not for your goal; in fact as you already experienced, the preparation can change the direction of contours while it shouldn’t do that. I’ll add this to the bug list and intend to fix it in the next upcoming release.

A workaround:
On the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the Font tab. Here you can enable the “Set left side bearing point at x=0” feature. This feature will only move outlines in order to get the left side bearing at x=0. It will not change anything else e.g. the direction of the contours. Now just open a font file and save it with another file name (no need to say to always make backups of your fonts). The font (still open in Font Creator) is updated immediately after the font is saved.

4

Thank you Erwin

Workaround worked very nicely.

Dick