I have been trying to use the facility to set the left side bearing to 0, both within the glyph transformer and when saving files.
I cannot get it to work.
Could someone please check to have a look if they have the same problem and if not perhaps suggest anything which I might be doing incorrectly please?
William Overington
Could you please explain what you expect to see after saving a font file with this setting enabled?
Herein lies confusion!
A bearing is a white space, not a line. The dashed line is the bearing extent line. To “set a bearing at 0” is to have no white space - and that could mean to the left of the glyph or to the right.
Joe.
Could you please explain what you expect to see after saving a font file with this setting enabled?
I was having a go at producing a font starting with the picture in the following thread.
http://forum.high-logic.com:9080/t/creating-a-font-with-pictures-of-the-individual-letters/1380/1
I added six glyph positions at the end of a new font.
Into the first I put the result of importing the picture.
I then copied that into the other five.
For each in turn I deleted 4 rows of contours and moved the remaining line down so that the letters all sat on a base line of 0 vertically.
I then copied each of the five glyphs many times, placing the copies in the glyphs for the letters of which it contained the design.
So, for example, the third of the six extra glyphs, containing the second row, was copied eighteen times into each of S to A and 0 to 9.
I then went through all of the glyphs for the capitals A to Z, lowercase a to z and the digits and punctuation etc and deleted everything except the contours for one character from each glyph.
So, for example, in the glyph for U the contours for S to T and V to 0 were deleted.
Thus I had a font with only the contours for the appropriate character in each used position, correctly aligned vertically, yet with widely different offsets, when I needed them all to be zero.
For example, U had glyph metrics of Left Side Bearing of -3537 and Advance Width of 768.
The glyph information panel does, however, have White space before character: -3537 (x = 0) so maybe that x = 0 is the clue to what is happening.
I tried moving one glyph manually and it took a time, so I tried the glyph transformer to set the left side bearing to 0, yet it did not seem to do anything.
So I asked in the forum.
Some time later I started trying the Tools | AutoMetrics… in case that could do it and it produced the correct result. I cannot remember exactly what I did, which is ironic as I usually make detailed notes of what I do as I go along, however, it was late and I was just trying Tools | AutoMetrics before finishing.
Yet I still do not understand why the glyph transformer did not do what I expected.
I feel that I am missing something and hope that I can learn what it is so that I can understand what is happening.
William
The OpenType specification talks about Left sidebearing point at x=0 and xMin is equal to the lsb.
However this is not what you are looking for. When you want to set xMin to 0, select all contours (CTRL-A) and the use the Transformation toolbar to set the x position to 0. It might be a nice enhancement for the Transform wizard.
Here are some screenshots that might help.
The glyph shown below has these metrics:
Left side bearing value: 100
Right side bearing value: 100
Advance width: 600
Left side bearing point: x = 100
Right side bearing point: x = 700
XMin: 200
XMax: 600
The glyph shown below has these metrics:
Left side bearing value: 100
Right side bearing value: 100
Advance width: 600
Left side bearing point: x = 0
Right side bearing point: x = 600
XMin: 100
XMax: 500
The glyph shown below has these metrics:
Left side bearing value: 0
Right side bearing value: 0
Advance width: 400
Left side bearing point: x = 200
Right side bearing point: x = 600
XMin: 200
XMax: 600
The glyph shown below has these metrics:
Left side bearing value: 0
Right side bearing value: 0
Advance width: 400
Left side bearing point: x = 0
Right side bearing point: x = 400
XMin: 0
XMax: 400
Hope this helps.
Thank you for your help.
I have now, using a copy of the font saved at an intermediate stage on Wednesday evening, repeated what I think I did.
I used Tools | AutoMetrics.. and selected every glyph for processing.
Then I used the Calculated option with White space before characters as 0 and White space after characters as 100 and excluding empty glyphs.
This seemed to have the desired effect.
After that, the contours of every glyph were scaled up by a factor of 1.28 with reference to the point (0,0) so that the font was, in artistic terms, made up of chunks of 128 font units by 128 font units.
William