Typophile

Existencial doubt about SMCP spacing in FL

ferfolio

Supose you have done a typeface in Fontlab, and you generate the SMCP glyphs.
Now, you need to space them and kern them at the metrics windows...

How the heck do you do it? I mean, It's difficult to create lines of texts in small caps at the metrics windows...

Do you use the preview window? / Do you put each smcp character separately at the metrics window? / Do you use some kind of awesome kerning preview text?

What I'm really asking is:
Is there any way to magically substitute lower case letters for small caps at the metrics windows so I can space them without having a headache?

As always thanks for the help! :)

Craig Eliason

This page can help generate preview strings.

Hrant H Papazian

Just try working with non-Latin... :-/

It's the worst thing about FontLab - a must-fix.

hhp

ferfolio

I can imagine! But eliason's page helps!

I was thinking, that perhaps the best thing is to create another font file and put the SMCP in the lowercase glyphs... and then try and joing them by exporting the kern and adding ".smcp" suffix with a program like sublime text (which is very helpful for those things)... But, it would take some time,

Anyway, thanks for solving my existential doubt :)

gargoyle

One common trick is to type/paste your string into the OpenType Features tab of the Preview panel, activate the feature (in this case SMCP), then copy the slash-coded string from the bottom of the panel into the Metrics window. If it's something you're likely to reuse, you can also add it to the list of preview strings (the Options '...' button in the Metrics window or Preview panel).

Or, if you happen to be using Windows, the FontLab 5.2 Public Preview version supports OpenType features in the Metrics window.

Sebastian Nagel

i even forgot that i created that script ... Glad it's still in use and can help :)
But that 5.2 ot-in-metrics feature sounds promising ...

Sebastian Nagel

what helps a lot when doing metrics of small caps etc. is to setup a basic string like
/H.sc/H.sc/H.sc/H.sc/H.sc/A.sc/H.sc/H.sc/H.sc/H.sc/H.sc/

then click the glyph you want to change, and use CRTL+mousewheel to switch to next glyph. No tedious typing involved. There are also keyboard shortcuts for it, but they seem to differ in platform, version and language of your keyboard ...

ferfolio

Cool, I like the ctrl+mousewheel! It saves time, thanks Sebastian :)

Captured from commoncrawl.org on 28 Mar 2015. original URL