Pixel Font from Illustrator to FontLab

abecedarienne4 March 2005 · 14:07

Hi Folks!

I am just getting into the nitty-gritty of making pixel fonts and am finding the transfer from Adobe Illustrator to FontLab 4.5 is bringing up some questions for me. I would love to hear your thoughts.

First, It seems elementary, but I don't know how a pixel font is made to appear correctly at the size it was designed for.

I opened Underware's Unibody8 Italic in FontLab to have a look. There are 8 pixels to the ascender, 7 pixels to the cap height, and 1 to the descender.

When you choose to use a font at 8pt, is that size then made the distance from baseline to ascender?

(I can't believe this is the first time I have thought about this!)

Second, it seems that the UPM measurement (no matter what it is) is equivalent to 571.4302px in Illustrator. Anybody else observe this?

This is a little awkward for calculating how to scale the glyphs when they come from Illustrator. The difference in size needs to be dealt with at some point and I am trying to find the best way.

What is your favorite method for scaling pixel fonts for FontLab, and at which point do you do it?

I don't have the luxury of ScanFont just yet, but I will eventually. Is this a smooth process in ScanFont with pixel fonts?

Also, I realize this process is probably rendered obsolete by BitFonter, but it's not worth the money to make a couple pixel fonts.

Thanks for your help!

-Amy

Hrant H Papazian4 March 2005 · 19:00

Hey Amy.

You don't want to just design directly in FontLab?

To figure out sizes, decide what point size the font will work at. And you might choose 8 no matter how many actually pixels the vertical span is (unless it's very large, like 18 or more) for a number of reasons (ask me if you really want to know :-). Divide the EM by that and you'll get the "pixel" size. So if your Em is 1000 and