วีดีโอ

Hi, this is Dave. I'm using the 16 inch M1 Macbook. Have you seen my tutorial series on FontLab.com? help.fontlab.com/fontlab/8/tutorials/calfonts/

Hi Pieris, Thanks for the suggestion! Sorry, we don't use Font Forge. Have you checked out FontLab recently? But we are planning on making more tutorials that cover the fundamentals of typography and fontdesign, no matter what app you are using.

@@californiatypefoundry When are you guys planning on making more tutorials? I don't see anything new on TH-cam.

Sorry to take so long to get back to you! Just to clarify: By line height, do you mean the space between lines (called the leading or line gap)? or do you mean something else, like the ascender, or the actual height of the letters?

@@californiatypefoundry Thank you for responding back. I think my question refers to the ascenders and descenders. I wanted to edit a font so it’s more compact, so I can have control over the line height across browsers.

​@@habibosaye This is Dave. Sure! Getting consistent line height across browsers is tricky. The problem is that each program interprets your font table's vertical metrics differently. To make a long story short get the relevant numbers equal to each other. Then, different programs will give you the same height. *STEPS* in menu: ❶ File>Font info...>Family Dimensions, you should set "Ascender" equal to "Safe top". ❷Also, you should set "Descender" equal to "Safe bottom". Safe top gives you the height of the highest glyph. Safe bottom gives you the lowest. ❸ So if the distance is too large between lines, adjust your diacritics. In the Glyph window adjust your diacritics closer to letters. (Or make the diacritics smaller.) ❹ Then go back into font info. ❺ Refresh the safe top and bottom, and repeat the process. ❻ Once you finish this, make sure the members of your family (regular, italic, bold, bold italic, and anything else) all match. The family dimensions page needs to be the same. hope this helps!

Hi Lord of Aragon, congrats on your new font! Is the font clipped in the preview panel? It's tricky to get the heights right. A complete guide is here: help.fontlab.com/fontlab/8/tutorials/calfonts/3.%20Fitting%20and%20Spacing/03a%20Setting%20Your%20Letter%20Heights/ As for this specific problem, go to menu>File>Font Info>Family Dimensions. First check to make sure that your Safe Top and Safe Bot are larger than the BBoxes below. If BBox numbers are empty, push the refresh button to the right.

Unfortunately, if your heights are off, you might need to resize everything. Look at the same Family Dimensions page. If you used defaults your Units Per eM should be 1000. That means roughly that from the top of the tallest letter (usually the f) to the bottom of the lowest letter (sometimes a g) should be around 950 units so there is still a bit of space. That means the height of your x should be anywhere from 300-600 units depending upon the style. The caps are usually at about 700 units. Of course these are rough numbers and cursives can go down to even 150 unit x-heights.

If your heights are twice as big, you could change the units per eM to 2000 or 2048 instead. However, 1000 is a nicer number to work with. So most likely you'd want to resize everything by selecting all letters and going to menu>Tools>Actions...>Scale. Currently I have a font where I need to change thousands of x-heights, because when I drew the XXBold, I found that the lowercase of the XXThins were too large! In that case, changing all the x-height, I can't use scale, but instead have to use the delta filter and power nudge. So that's going to take me a while, but sometimes you can't tell something is bad until the future. Such as "oh man, maybe I shouldn't have been drinking that night." In my case, I should have known to check the x-height earlier! ... Anyways, let me know which of these things helped you! Cheers, Dave

@@californiatypefoundry Amazing! Thanks for you help. I'm gonna do just that. I appreciate you.

Thanks! Much appreciated.

Thanks for the comment! This is very helpful to know! I can definitely cover those and do something more comprehensive in a video. I'm thinking going over the entire process from letters that are drawn but not spaced. Would that or something else be more helpful?

@@californiatypefoundry Thanks for replied. Just that it, Dave. Maybe, one more about how to use Classes for OpenType Features, and Classes for Tags. Thank you.

Hi, @dimanirwan. Made a video here on metrics (sidebearings): th-cam.com/video/M7blYoFrCAk/w-d-xo.html Is this helpful? Let me know if this is the right type of video, or if you were expecting something else. Thx! Dave

@@californiatypefoundry Thank you, Dave for your new video about metrics. Next I'll be waiting about kerning & kerning classes (1st, 2nd kerning, both kerning) with a right step-by-step, and video OpenType classes, and Tag classes. Thanks.

Great! I'm glad it was helpful. That video is not performing as well as the others, so I'm not sure if I'm going to do long form like that. Would a short form series of those topics still be helpful? Thanks, Dave PS Please share and like! That will encourage me to make more of these types of videos.

Dave here. You can start from the letters that you already have. Are you creating a Latin font? (As opposed to Cyrillic or another script.) If so I'm thinking of making a video (really it would be a video series) that shows the process.

@@californiatypefoundry I'm just working on a regular English font. I've actually been bouncing around trying out different design softwares. Currently trying to design my font using the Birdfont software. This is mainly because I'm having trouble trying to shape my characters perfectly the way I want them. Though, if I could afford a paying software I suppose I'd have better luck with precision of my characters.

Hi Amil Dave here. Sorry, I thought you had FontLab already. Yeah FontLab does have better ways to make both condensed from a previous font and shaping characters better. FontLab is pro software and a bargain price for how powerful it is. And I've used everything Adobe: inDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Audition and music notation like Sibelius, Finale, Final Cut, and FontLab is by far my favorite program... and doesn't have a subscription fee. At the very least, try it for 7 days, and go through my written tutorials. If you go through all the tutorials and use the files I have provided, it is equivalent to doing a $4,910 type design workshop. (Almost equivalent to Cooper Union but of course without networking connections.) And I have stuff in there that's not even covered in many type design courses. Cheers, and best of luck! -Dave

oh another thing, in your first message, it seems like you were wondering if FontLab could import your previous file, and yes, it can open up your exported font. (From Birdfont, export an OTF, which uses cubic splines). And you can copy shapes into and from FontLab. Hope this helps!

@@californiatypefoundry Yeah, unfortunately I can't really afford something like FontLab or any other font editor that costs almost $100.00. I'll have to take my chances with FontForge.

Hi Yaseen, thank you for your kind comments! So you are finding it worst the inclusion of languages required to design the characters. When you say the ranges and types of basic characters are easy to include in the glyphs app and are sequential, what type of sequence do you mean?

Thanks for the kind words!!