first character

[civil]

Hi,
I want to ignore first character's left bearing and last character's right bearing in the word. How can I do it? Thanks a lot.

[Dave Crosby]

I want to ignore first character's left bearing and last character's right bearing in the word. How can I do it?

I'm not sure what you mean.

The Bearings tell the computer where to start and end the bitmap it makes from your glyph.

Changing the Bearing locations will increase whitespace or cause overlap on whatever character is printed next.

To see immediate changes add Comparison to what you are seeing in the edit window and type whatever characters you wish to see before and after the glyph you are working on.

View > Toolbars > Comparison.

[civil]

For example we wrote "Pencil"
Char. Left Bearing Body Right Bearing Total Dimensions
P 42 120 18 180
e 27 108 24 159
n 36 108 36 180
c 27 96 24 147
i 36 24 36 96
l 36 24 36 96

A 15 150 15 180

and totally dimension of "pencil" is equal to 180+159+180+147+96+96=858 but I want to ignore "P"s left bearing and "l"s right bearing. So total dimension must be 858-36-42=780.

For "Apple" dimension must be 180+180+180+96+96+159-15-15=861.

I hope I can explain, what do I mean?

[Erwin Denissen]

I doubt if it's worthwhile, but it might be possible with OpenType layout features. And even then it will only work when your word processing software supports those features.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

It may be possible to use kerning pairs for this.

You can make a kerning pair for [space] P too if required, but probably a waste of time. Use manual kerning in your application.

[civil]

Thanks for reply but I think there is a simpiler way. It is necessary everywhere. Program must solve this problem easily with a little "if clause"

[William]

Could you possibly say why you are trying to achieve this end result please? For example, is it something to do with fitting the text into a box?

William Overington

16 April 2008

[Erwin Denissen]

I don't think Microsoft is willing to make your requested changes to their rasterizer, unless they see a real benefit. So please explain what you want to accomplish.

It might be easier to download and modify the FreeType font engine.

[civil]

I'm a civil engineer and I design traffic projects. In traffic posts, there is a city name and way. I made a new font to use on it. I have to give dimensions of city names but when I snapped on the name of the city in Microstation (it is a program which like AutoCAD) it kept with first character with its space. So I can't measure correct dimensions. You can see sample below.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

It is up to your layout program to do this.

In PagePlus (I used PP9) one could simply convert the text to curves and the word will then have no left and right side-bearings.

Nallihan.png (10.19 KiB) Viewed 9573 times

The top word is artistic text, the bottom word has been converted to curves.
Notice the difference in the sizes of the selection bounding boxes.

Perhaps your program can do the same, but this is not something that a font could do easily, whereas a DTP program makes this task very simple. DrawPlus would be more suitable if you need dimension lines, but just for graphic design and layout,

PagePlus is excellent. PP9 is just £9.99

[civil]

Thanks a lot. It is exactly what I said. I will investigate my program can do it or not.

[William]

... I made a new font to use on it. ...

As you are making your own special font, I have thought of a possible way to get the desired effect. I have made a test font and uploaded it to the web.

If the test font works as you wish, then you could use the method with your own font and hopefully achieve your desired result.

The link to the test font is as follows.

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

The font is named as follows.

Quest Signs Experiment

I started with a copy of my own Quest text font.

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

I deleted most of the glyphs, so as to produce a small font for the experiment.

I then used Tools Autometrics... in FontCreator and put 0 font units at each side of each character.

I then deleted the contours of the = character and made it have a width of 256 font units. That is, it acts as a space between characters.

I then tested the font using the following text.

M=a=i=n=z

So, could you perhaps try the Quest Signs Experiment font in the Microstation program please and post a message about how it performs please?

I hope that this helps.

William Overington

16 April 2008

[civil]

Quest Signs Experiment cant solve this problem. Because every glyphs has different bearings.

i finally solved my problem by exploding the word into graphichal interface of Microstation. Thanks a lot for your patience.

[Dick Pape]

Since you've got something that works, I wonder if you can fake it by removing the left and right side bearings on all glyphs and then create a small "space" e.g., filler, which you insert between each letter such as A.B.C.E for instance.

In the end there is no white space before or after any letter except when you place it there.

[civil]

The distance between each letter are known as you see above. If I remove the bearings and insert a small space the differce will be constant so font will not be usefull.