Shifting entire font up leads to cutting off top/bottom

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1

Hey guys, I hope you can help me.

I am trying to find a way to create pixel fonts and am having a lot of trouble. I know FontCreator is not ideal for that, but here is how I am going about it:

First, I use this website to create my pixel font: http://www.pentacom.jp/soft/ex/font/edit_canvas.html

Once I am done creating my characters, I click the Create Font button which makes a TTF that generally seems to work well. The problem is, that simple creation tool allows for 10 vertical pixels for shapes, 2 pixels of which are below the baseline. My pixel font consists mostly of little icons and pictures, rather than letters, and I really have to use the full height. This means that when I use this font in conjunction with other pixel fonts, it appears totally misaligned and shifted down by 2 pixels, making my designs look almost like subscripts relative to other fonts.

In FontCreator, first I will select all and go to Tools->Glyph Transformer and shift everything up by 200 (2 pixels). This places the shapes above some of the ascender lines, which needs fixing. I have tried every combination of calculating or manually setting font metrics, etc, in FontCreator’s Format->Settings dialog, but when I save and use the font, (and specifically in Adobe Flash, where I need this font) either the top is cut off, the bottom is cut off, or it may display OK in its original location, but then has the problem of being annoyingly too low on the baseline.

After I shift the glyphs up by 200, all glyphs sit between y=0 and y=1000, so in Format->Settings->Metrics, I assumed that I could do this:

Typo Ascender, Win Ascent, Ascender = 1000
All descenders and line gaps = 0

This actually seems to work fine if I use this font on Flash on the MAC. But on Windows, it insists on chopping off the top or bottom 2 pixels.

I know this is a pretty specific set of requirements, but I would be super happy with any help to try ans resolve this. I am not very knowledgeable about font metrics, so that doesn’t help, and it might be an issue related to Flash. However, I have in the past been able to alter a font as created by http://www.pentacom.jp/soft/ex/font/edit_canvas.html and have is display correctly (after shifting up by 2 pixels) in another app, but it took so many random guesses at modifications that I would never be able to reproduce it. Ironically, that font worked on Windows but NOT on Mac.

If anyone is inclined to help, just create a simple font at that website and then use FontCreator to shift it up by 2 pixels and see if it can be made to work right in Adobe Flash. Thanks very very much!

2

If all descenders and line gap are zero, then the font is not going to sit on the baseline with regular fonts, which have descenders. Your font must have descender values similar to other pixel fonts.

d ▉ p ▲

3

Thank you for the information about the website. It is interesting.

However, I wonder if you might get better results for your particular use if you made your initial font using FontStruct instead.

http://fontstruct.fontshop.com

I have found that making a font 15 FontStruct blocks high above the baseline works well.

There is a thread about FontStruct in this forum, which is where I first learned about FontStruct.

http://forum.high-logic.com:9080/t/fontstruct/2062/1

I have made a few fonts using FontStruct. FontStruct does have limitations, but it is very useful for some purposes. I have got good results by making a font using FontStruct and then processing it using FontCreator 5.6: the processing involving removing redundant points and fixing a few overlapping contour problems. I have also altered the metrics on the fonts.

I do not fully understand metrics. I tend to alter them to the following, which is what I usually use in FontCreator 5.6 when making fonts from a blank start.

I always use, on Format Settings… Header Layout 2048 Units per em. That is the default with FontCreator 5.6, but FontStruct gives 1024 Units per em. Maybe there is no need to change it, but I do.

I then have, at Format Settings… Metrics, Typo Ascender, Win Ascent and Ascender set at 2048, Typo Line Gap and Line Gap set at 0, and Typo Descender, Win Descent and Descender all set at the same value, which depends on the font, but is always a multiple of 256. I have used 0 for some symbol-like fonts, I cannot remember ever having used -256 or -512 but I have used -768, -1024, -1280 and -1536.

The -1536 is rather extreme, it is in a font design with very long ascenders and descenders.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/CHRONICL.TTF

I usually use a value of -768 or -1024 for a text font.

I made a font at the http://www.pentacom.jp/soft/ex/font/edit_canvas.html website, saved it to local storage on this computer (PC running Windows xp professional) and then opened it in FontCreator 5.6. The font I made was just using the Sample button, so there is no artistic input from me.

Running Font Validate… informed me that 92 glyphs have problems.

So I shifted the glyphs up by 200 and changed the metrics as you did. Testing the font in FontCreator 5.6 clipped the descenders, and trying the font in Microsoft WordPad at 24 point clipped the descenders as well.

What I tend to do in a situation of this kind, namely a situation where I have a font with artwork that I want yet the font was either made with an older fontmaking program, or has some structural problem that I either cannot locate or am unsure how to fix, is to start a new font in FontCreator 5.6, with no outlines included, and then set metrics and so on in FontCreator 5.6 in the new font and copy the artwork only from the old font into the new font, if necessary one glyph at a time, though often large runs of glyphs can all be copied at once; for example A..Z or a..z.

This method has always produced good results. The artwork is conserved and is available in a font structure that is made in FontCreator 5.6.

I hope that this helps.

William Overington

25 May 2009