As I mentioned, I’m drawing the characters in a Draw program at 300 x 300 pixels and copying and pasting them into the Font Creator Glyph Edit window. I’m just using the default settings, I haven’t tried using any of the many tools yet.
This works very well, but I am confused about where the guidelines should be. When I paste the characters into the Glyph edit window, the program is bumping them right up to the left guideline, which is set at zero by default.
Am I supposed to move that left guideline to the left in order to open up some space around the glyph? Most of the time the program generates my pasted character with space before the right guideline (varying space because my characters all tend to have different widths). But there is no space before the left guideline.
I’m guessing I need to have space before the left guideline too. But how much? And how much on the right? And what’s the best way to do this – by dragging the guides for each glyph manually? Or by entering numbers in the Glyph Properties window? Or will auto-metrics and auto kern make the needed space for me automatically?
Thanks for any help. I must say I can tell already that this program is light years ahead of any other fontmaking program I tried!
It IS a fantastic program! Your only problem now is NOMENCLATURE. Getting that down only comes with using the program, studying, and asking questions.
That “Left guideline” is actually the Left Bearing of the glyph. Your glyph CAN extend to the left of it, but will intrude into the previous glyph space when used.
I like using the 0,0 position as the starting point for each glyph for my mental reference (I have PERFECT memory, but it is really short) but you can set it anywhere you wish. Select Tools, Autometrics, >>, and you can adjust the WHITE SPACE around all of your glyphs at once.
You will need to go back and manually reset the Right Bearing of the Space glyph (the 4th glyph) for proper spacing. Use the “Test Font” button to see how things look.
Guidelines are found in Tools, Guideline Options. Or you can just select any two points and press “G.” Drag them off the workspace when you are through with them.
I just requested that Erwin add a box allowing us to de-select this character, and THEN remembered seeing a “<” on the Autometrics window.
I experimented and found that my request is NOT necessary!
Go to Tools, Autometrics, >>, select the space glyph, < to remove it and let it run! I’ve been doing it the hard way for over a year!
