#FONTFORGE SORT GLYPHS WINDOWS#

In the lower line, the side bearings are not equal but the spacing appears balanced.Ī tool for generating such texts is available at Stringmaker by Nina Stössinger. So for the example below, the side bearings of the ‘H’ and ‘O’ are equal, but look unequal. An obvious example of this can be seen when attempting to space the characters ‘H’ and ‘O’. For example, whilst the measurements between two characters may be unequal, the eye can see them as equal. The bottom line is to ‘design, look, adjust, look again’.įor the absolute beginner, do not assume that reliable results are achieved by relying on the measured space. Note though that this is not a hard and fast rule, but a general one.Īs you space the characters that you design, you should trust your eyes. General PrinciplesĪs a general principle, symmetric characters such as ‘A’ ‘H’ ‘I’ ‘M’ ‘N’ ‘O’ ‘T’ ‘U’ ‘V’ ‘W’ ‘X’ ‘Y’ ‘o’ ‘v’ ‘w’ ‘x’ will have symmetric side bearings, e.g., the left and right side bearings of an ‘H’ will be the same value. The up and down keys are used to increment / decrement values and Alt + Up, Alt + Down, Alt + Left and Alt + Right are used for navigating around the different value fields of the Metrics Window. One method of adjusting metric values quickly and accurately in FontForge is by using the up, down, left and right keys of a keyboard. Using commands in the Metrics Window’s Metrics menu.Īdjusting Side Bearing Values with the keyboard.Incremented / decremented by using the keyboard.

Directly editing their value in the metrics tables of the Metrics Window.Note though that dragging a character will only effect the value of the left side bearing. Manually dragging each side bearing boundary.The side bearings of characters can be edited in FontForge’s Metrics Window in five ways: Each glyph has a left side bearing and a right side bearing in the example below of the lowercase ‘a’ of Open Sans, the right sidebearing has a value of 166 units, and the left sidebearing has a value of 94 units. These spaces between glyphs are composed of the ‘side bearings’ from each glyph pair. The space between any two glyph has two components: the space after the first glyph, and the space before the second glyph.

#FONTFORGE SORT GLYPHS WINDOWS#

Metrics Windows can be opened from the ‘Window’ menu, or by using the Ctrl + K command. In FontForge, the Metrics Window allows you to design the metrics of your font, alter the spacing between them, and test how glyphs look together. Good spacing is necessary for a font to function well. The spaces between characters are an important, integral part of the design of a font.ĭesigning a font’s letter spacing should be carried out as an integral part of the whole process of designing a font.

Fontforge sort glyphs