Accounting for Long & Tall Tails

[Dick Pape]

Saw an interesting spacing solution when glyphs have extreme ascenders or descenders. The normal approach is illustrated when the bodies of the characters are the same size and the tails extend downward. The whole font then has a singular look and text fits together on a line nicely.


An innovative solution is to make individual characters the same size as shown here:

It seems correct for these fonts as you'd "never" use two in a row and the user is able to set the exact size needed for each letter without having blank spaces for glyphs without tails. It does look peculiar, but I think it would work well in use.

[William]

Some readers might like a copy of a font with long ascenders and descenders which I made some time ago.

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

William Overington

3 March 2008

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Never say never

The problem is aligning the baseline of the Drop Cap (at a larger pointsize) with the baseline of the body text (at smaller point sizes). Then, keeping the drop caps in the right proportion to each other will require that different leaders are set at different point sizes. This prevents the use of styles.

I think the solution of using fixed linespacing (or just leaving the text widely spaced) is much easeir.