How to make some characters simply 'smaller'

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1

Hi all,

I have a problem with all fonts :wink:

The problem is, whenever I choose a font to use for writing Japanese, I have to make it really big to clearly see the characters. I maybe a relative beginner at Japanese, but I find it impossible to read Kanji Characters at much less than 16-18px on average.

The problem with this that that size, is that any English characters which are interspersed (which is pretty much always the case) are WAY TOO BIG.

So, I want to grab some of my favourite downloaded Japanese fonts, and edit the English characters to just simply be ‘smaller’. How to do this with Font Creator, though, is something else. It’s nicely featured but it seems I need a degree in font engineering before I can start :wink:
I couldn’t work out just how to make the selected characters just ‘smaller’.

Would this be easy, does anyone have any tips for doing this?

2

Actually, I apologise, there is a post below that pretty-much answers this question already:

http://forum.high-logic.com:9080/t/resize-a-font/881/1

3

Actually, I may still need some help on this, because the instructions don’t quite produce the desired results.

Soon, I will have to delve into the help file, I realise, but the instructions below, leave me with a larger font, but the space between characters unchanged, resulting in the characters being so close that they overwrite each other.

Is there a button or mode or way of changing the font-size in Font Creator that isn’t so ‘low-level’ that I need to consider so many other things. Is there just a “make the font bigger” button? (or equivalent) :wink:

  1. Save your font! I suggest place it in a new folder and alter the name.
  2. Select Tools, Glyph Transformer, All, Outlines, Scale, use arrow.
  3. Set amount of magnification you want 200% - 300%
  4. Set Around - I would use fixed point X =0, Y=0, OK.
  5. You will get a warning. Proceed only if you have a backup (1. above)
    If you don’t like the results, close the font without saving, and start over.
4

This is how to do it.

:arrow_right: Decide how much you need to scale the English characters by.
:arrow_right: Select all of the English characters (they don’t have to be in sequence but probably are)
:arrow_right: On the format settings header tab, increase the Units per em value, multipying it by the scale factor you want.
:arrow_right: All of the letters in the font will now get bigger. Copy these bigger characters to the clipboard, leaving them selected.
:arrow_right: Undo (Control Z)
:arrow_right: Paste the larger letters back into the same place. The glyph metrics will be scaled as well as the glyph. Hinting information is not lost if you use this method.