Q: How Make an Upside-Down Version of an Existing Font?

JamesC · Post by **JamesC** » Mon May 03, 2004 7:03 pm

I'm working on an application to be used on a PDT. Due to the physical characteristics of the hardware, it needs to be held upside-down for normal operation - but this means that the user will have to rotate it back right-side-up to read entries.

This problem could be eliminated if the font used for the displays I'm creating was upside-down. I've found a few upside-down fonts, but there are readability problems with some of the characters (this isn't a high resolution display).

Keeping in mind that I'm an absolute beginner to fonts and FCP, what are the steps I should use to invert a character so that it will look and read normally when viewed upside-down on a screen?

Thanks for any help you can give me. Please don't worry about offending me by gving elementary instructions - you can safely assume I know nothing about using FCP. Most of the terminology used in this forum is new to me, too

James Cox

Bhikkhu Pesala · Post by **Bhikkhu Pesala** » Mon May 03, 2004 8:15 pm

I am assuming that you have downloaded Font Creator 4 from the download page. This has a Transform toolbar, which can be used to mirror characters horizontally and vertically. The latest beta version has a transformation wizard that will do this for the entire font. Accents remain at the top of letters though.

However, that solves only half the problem, as the font presumably needs to work from right to left too. I have never used Font Creator for Right to Left fonts, though some people do.

With a low resoloution display, you probably need a bitmapped font for the best legibility, rather than a scalable vector font. Again, I have no experience of creating bitmapped fonts. There was at least one earlier thread on bitmap fonts with this useful link.

Somebody might be able to help more. What is the resolution of the display? How many pixels are used for each character cell?

Dick Pape · Post by **Dick Pape** » Mon May 03, 2004 11:20 pm

I believe Bhikkhu Pesala gave the right answer, "yes, Font Creator can put font glyphs upside and/or backwards, but that doesn't seem to be the issue".

The line of text has to be formed with the first char on the lower right margin which seems beyond FCP's specifications. If you can do that FCP can create the font for you.

I didn't use transform, but the old fashioned way of inverting each character (Properties; Rotation, 180 degrees), realigning the old baselines to a new high base line and defining new descender line, etc. but upside down the alphabet read of course ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA ...

So I reordered it ABCDE... but that was wrong too ... I had fun trying but it kept going back to his statement "However, that solves only half the problem".

Dick

Bhikkhu Pesala · Post by **Bhikkhu Pesala** » Tue May 04, 2004 8:41 am

Though I said it solves only half the problem, in fact it doesn't even solve that much, as the font has to wrap from bottom to top too.

Have you thought of fixing a prism to the hand-held device?

JamesC · Post by **JamesC** » Tue May 04, 2004 5:58 pm

Thanks for the tips, folks!

I used the "brute force and awkwardness" method of double-clicking on each glyph, drawing a "selection outline" around the whole glyph and then using the Transformation ToolBar's vertical flip to invert the glyph.

The first letter transformed was the capital E and I used the up and down keyboard arrows to move the bottom back up to the same level as the top had been.

Using the E as a reference and the Font | Test feature to examine the results (at about 36 font size so the differences were easier to see), I flipped the basic upper case letters and numbers and adusted their postions until the bases looked right.

Lower case letters and symbols were done the same way, with a bit more fiddling required to get them about right (in hindsight, creating a reference of the veritcal alignment by printing all the characters out between a couple of E's would have been a good idea).

I deleted all glyphs in the original set except the ones on a US-standard keyboard, which helped a bit. The final operation at the glyph level was to use the Transformation Toolbar's Mirror option to do the left-right flip.

In terms of the issue of right-justification and inverse sequencing, my application needs only short text strings and I'm working in Microsoft's eVB environment. This gives me textboxes that can be set for right justification of text. If I had been using Microsoft VB, textboxes there have a RightToLeft property that might be able to handle the inverse sequencing of letters, but eVB has a function StrReverse which returns a string in reverse character sequence.

Given all of the above, it seems that we can get where we need to be. There is probably some elegant (or at least faster!) way of doing the vertical flip and re-alignment of the glyph bases, but shift-and-check was adequate.

Again, thanks! If anyone has the expertise with Font Creator and is moved to elaborate on the right way to do that, it would be interesting.

(Unfortunately, prisms were not part of the solution space for this application, but the underlying simplicity of the texts we need to display made them unnecessary! )

JamesC

Bhikkhu Pesala · Post by **Bhikkhu Pesala** » Tue May 04, 2004 7:31 pm

The right way would be with the latest beta using the Glyph transform wizard. I did this one in half a dozen clicks.

Tools, Glyph Transformer, Outline, Mirror, Horizontal and Vertical, Range All, OK. One will then also need to shift some baselines, but most look OK.

This is how it looks in Preview after a rough and ready adjustment of the baselines: