Just a thought on guidelines

[Lesley Prince]

Sometimes I get very confused with all the guidelines that I occassionally need when setting up a font. I have not yet found a way of resetting the red guides that appear in the glyph editing window, so set up my own in preference. In some of my fonts the x-height is very different to the red guide, and sometimes I need several guidelines around the same area, for example three or four different guides around the cap height region. This can be very messy and highly confusing, so I wondered if, in future versions of FontCreator, it would be possible to be provided with the faciltiy for setting user defined, guides first in several colours so that they can be distinguished visually from one another, and second with the ability to give them labels such as high cap, low cap or whatever the user needs them to say? It's just a thought. Meanwhile I will press on with the chaos of lines that I have

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

The metrics guidelines are determined by the metrics of the font you're working on.

• The x-height, as you would expect, is determined by the highest point on the lowercase x.
• The Caps Height is determined by the highest point on the Capital H.
• The Ascender height, IIRC, is determined by the ascender of the lowercase d.
• The Descender is determined by the bottom of the lowercase p.

You can decide which metrics lines to display in Tools, Metrics Options. You can also choose the line style and colour. The user guides have their own colour options.

FontCreator guides are very powerful — better than the drawing program I currently use (Serif DrawPlus)

1. Hold shift to rotate a guide to diagonal while dragging with the mouse
2. Select two nodes in points mode then press shortcut "g" to create a diagonal guide through the two nodes
3. Select one node and press shortcut "g" to create orthogonal guides through the node
4. Hold Control while dragging to create another guide.
5. Double-click a guide to edit its position precisely
6. Double-click the rulers to open the guidelines options dialogue to change colours or set/remove multiple guides

The guides are saved in the guidelines.dat file (in %AppData%\FontCreator) that you could backup to avoid losing them, or create copies of it for different fonts.