Spacing problem for symbol font

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smderrick
Posts: 14
Joined: Tue Mar 16, 2004 10:14 pm

Spacing problem for symbol font

Post by smderrick »

I am making a font that will make decorative frames. I made the advance width of every glyph divisable by 400, some of the horizontal frame characters (the ones that make up the top and bottom of the frame) are just 400 wide, some are as large as 3200. My vertical frame characters (that make up the sides of the frame) are all 400 wide. I figured if I made my space 400 wide, after typing the characters for the top row, on the second row you would be able to type a vertical character, space over and, no matter what characters you had chosen for the horizontal top of the frame, the last character would line up at the end with the character above it since they all are divisable by 400. For some reason, this doesn't happen and it ends up just the tiniest bit off every time. I can't figure out why or how to fix the problem. Any help with this would be appreciated. Thanks!

Sue
Bhikkhu Pesala
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Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

If you can send me the font I will take a look at it for you.
My FontsReviews: MainTypeFont CreatorHelpFC15 + MT12.0 @ Win 10 64-bit build 19045.2486
William
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Post by William »

This may be like my mathematical pseudo-hinting effect in reverse!

Are you using a PC with a Microsoft platform?

If you were to try making your symbols vertically 2048 font units and horizontally a multiple of 256 font units, then you might get better results. Thus a square element would be 2048 units wide. A double width element would be 4096 font units wide. It would also be helpful to make the space character 2048 font units wide.

The reason why this may perhaps improve your results is that the Microsoft PC platform uses 16 pixels for 12 point and needs to convert font units to pixels when producing a display. By using multiples of 256 font units, one helps the system make its decision exactly without it needing to make rounding decisions as to how many pixels to use for a width such as 400 or 800 or 1200 font units when 16 pixels represent 2048 font units.

I have a font available on the web which encodes graphic items intended to be used to produce designs. You might like to have a look at my STYLEART.TTF font. In particular the metrics settings under Format | Settings... Metrics. It is downloadable from the following web page.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/fonts.htm

William Overington
William
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Post by William »

I posted some notes about my ideas for what I call mathematical pseudo-hinting in the Discussion forum in a thread entitled Lack of Clarity of Fonts about a month ago.

viewtopic.php?t=876

Also, I mentioned in this thread that the Microsoft platform uses 16 pixels for 12 point. I should have said that at least the Windows 95 and Windows 98 platforms use 16 pixels for 12 point when using an 800 wide by 600 high display as those are the only machines upon which I have tested it. Other Windows platforms may possibly use that setting or may perhaps use something else. I did my checks by setting some text, doing a PrintScreen, pasting into Microsoft Paint then viewing at 8x magnification and counting pixels by adding pixels alongside in a different colour so as to make a rule, the rule being drawn four pixels wide at every tenth pixel, two pixels wide for all other even-numbered pixels and one pixel wide for all other pixels. The test could be done easily using the STYLEART.TTF font using a figure 1 as that is a full 2048 font unit by 2048 font unit square.

Incidentally, I like the Paint program: I find that it is very versatile.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/pai04000.htm

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/pai04100.htm

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/pai04200.htm

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/pai04300.htm

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/pai30000.htm

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

William
smderrick
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Joined: Tue Mar 16, 2004 10:14 pm

Post by smderrick »

William, you are a genius. I changed everything to increments of 128, as 256 would have changed the size too much, and everything works just perfectly. You know, I thought it might have something to do with the units, but I just couldn't figure out what!

Thank you so much!
Sue
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