I am new to font design, and am attempting to modify an existing font to contain special phonetic characters. At first I simply copied and pasted existing glyphs (e.g. 't') and then modified them by pasting another glyph of some diacritic with the original glyph.
The problem was when I used the font on Word other other applications. My copied characters looked very poor on screen though they looked great in print. I found that was fixed somewhat with Screen Font smoothing. (Thank you for the helpful discussions.)
But the characters still didn't look as nice on the screen. I then found that I could create a new character, and insert the glyphs creating composite glyphs. This preserved the hinting to make the characters look good on screen.
However, when I tried to insert an 'h' and then scale it to make it a superscripted character, it looked great in FCP, but when I installed the font, the superscripted 'h' was way out of proportion, and looked awful.
Any ideas for making the scaling of inserted glyphs work better?
Thank you for any and all assistance! Your program is great, and the website very helpful!
scaling inserted glyphs
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Bhikkhu Pesala
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Scaling Composite Glyphs
When you want to scale a composite glyph, you cannot do this by selecting it and manually scaling it like you can with a simple glyph. You have to edit the glyph properties (Alt Enter) and set scale values. You can, however, drag and position the composite in the usual way with the mouse, instead of setting precise co-ordinates in the glyph properties dialogue box.
If you use a composite, it should preserve hinting, as you found already. I don't see why you should have any problem with the propoortions of the scaled character. For a superscript you scale it between 0.5 and 0.7
If you use a composite, it should preserve hinting, as you found already. I don't see why you should have any problem with the propoortions of the scaled character. For a superscript you scale it between 0.5 and 0.7
Bhikku,
Thank you for the response. I actually did use the edit glyph window to scale the character when I got the bad result in Word. The regular character was fine, and the 'h' was superscripted, but it was out of proportion and was very wide.
I was wondering if maybe I created another glyph with just the 'h' and scaled it, and then inserted that glyph rather than having one glyph with full scaling, and the other as a smaller scale.
I went with the .7 scaling for the 'h'.
Thank you for the reply. I will let you know how it goes with the above proposal.
Thank you for the response. I actually did use the edit glyph window to scale the character when I got the bad result in Word. The regular character was fine, and the 'h' was superscripted, but it was out of proportion and was very wide.
I was wondering if maybe I created another glyph with just the 'h' and scaled it, and then inserted that glyph rather than having one glyph with full scaling, and the other as a smaller scale.
I went with the .7 scaling for the 'h'.
Thank you for the reply. I will let you know how it goes with the above proposal.