Moving default horizontal guide

[franksacco]

I would like to move the default black horizontal line that resides below the red base line. Can this be done? I cannot seem to move this manually as I can with horizontal guides that I create myself. The reason for wanting to move this guide further down is when I'm creating a lower case y or any other descender, I don't seem to have enough vertical space, making the lower part of the letter to appear squashed. Thank you!

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Just draw your longest descenders as you want them to be, then Format, Settings, Metrics, Calculate to recalculate the WinDescent value. The distance between the black lines is used by Windows Applications when calculating how to display your font at a given point size. See Metrics in the manual. If you draw outside the black lines, characters will be clipped, but recalculating font metrics will move the WinAscent and WinDescent lines. See also the FAQ thread in this forum.

[William]

You can move the line by altering the figures in the Format | Settings... | Metrics panel.

In fact, one of the first things that I do when starting a font is to set the metrics to 2048 upwards, minus some number downwards and zero in between, the number downwards always being a multiple of 256 in my way of designing fonts. That way of proceeding may not be for everyone, but it does seem to work well.

If you so choose, you could obtain a copy of my 10000 font from the web and load it into Font Creator and have a look at the Format | Settings... | Metrics panel settings for the font and observe which numbers I have put where.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/10000.TTF

I hope that this helps.

William Overington