Typophile

Vertical metrics

alex scholing

Hi everybody,

I’m in the final stage of building a number of new fonts. Right now I’m trying to get the vertical metrics right and for some reason beyond my grasp some of them won’t get right, no matter what I try.

Below are a roman and an italic version of the same typeface, with identical vertical metrics and identical specs in Indesign. Still, they won’t line up.

I’ve read and read over again the wonderful article on vertical metrics by John Hudson here on Typophile (thank you John) and religiously followed his guidings and guess what, they work wonderfully. Except for this pair. Anyone any idea what I’m doing wrong?

Thanks,
Alex

Jason Campbell

Are the zones set up the same (I'm assuming these are hinted cff/postscript fonts?)

Jason C

Theunis de Jong

Jason, the distances in the image seems to be a bit much to blame to hinting ... Hinting should be rounding individual pixels up or down, non?

Alex may need to confirm that his

identical vertical metrics

are indeed correct. It might be something as small as a different line gap value.

alex scholing

More and more I’m inclined to think the problem lies within InDesign. I still don’t know exactly what’s going on, but when generating PFD’s from InDesign I sometimes get mixed results. When viewing the same fonts in let’s say Linotype FontExplorer there seems to be no lining problem.

alex scholing

And then there is the zoom factor in Indesign. When viewing a text @ fit-to-window there is a lining problem, when zoomed @ max there is not...

Bert Vanderveen

All the Adobe apps use an custom Adobe-built rasterizer to display type etc. instead of the rasterizer of the system (OS X, Windows, etc). What you noticed could be typical for that and might be a bug that needs reporting and fixing. You should try and file a bug report at Adobe’s site…

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