Typophile

Simultaneously changing size of multiple glyphs in Fontlab?

Vicke

Hi, I'm in the middle of creating a digital version of my 40s typewriter font. So far I used Bitfonter and have now imported into FontLab. For some reason though all the glyphs became much bigger in Fontlab, exceeding the ascender and descender heights by far. Anyway, I started to go about manually changing a few whilst mindlessly watching TV only to realise that surely there must be a way to change them uniformly?? Even in BitFonter actually there is a way to resize all selected glyphs in the glyph window. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

gargoyle

Select all your glyphs in the Font window and go to Tools > Action > Contour > Scale. To find the right percentage, first scale a single glyph while the Transformation panel is open. (You can also scale multiple glyphs with just the Transformation panel, but there's no option to scale the metrics.)

HVB

I'd guess that your UPM was different between BitFonter and FontLab (possibly 2048 in Bitfonter and 1000 in FontLab). In Fontlab, Font Information/Metrics lets you change the UPM with or without re-scaling to fit. Two steps; First, set the UPM to its original value (2048) without re-sizing. (You CAN leave it that way, in which case an OTF would be non-standard but your glyphs will be exactly as you create them). Or go on to the second step, changing the UPM back to 1000 WITH re-sizing. You'll then have a standard UPM for OpenType, but your glyphs will have small (sometimes imperceptible and sometimes glaring) differences because of the different grid size.

Captured from commoncrawl.org on 27 Apr 2015. original URL