New to Typophile? Accounts are free, and easy to set up.
fontographer sizing
Posted by thomas lincoln in
23 Feb 2010 — 12:43pm
23 Feb 2010 — 12:43pm
What is a good procedure for re-sizing characters that have been imported into Fontographer? My entire font needs to be enlarged by 149% to meet the publisher's technical requirements. I find that I can enlarge one character at a time using Fontographer's Transform function, but when I select multiple characters they not only enlarge, but turn upside down.
There must surely be a simpler solution to this problem. Any ideas?
Tom Lincoln
User login
Support our Sponsors
23 Feb 2010 — 1:28pm
It's been years since I've used Fontographer, but here's a trick I figured out way back when for scaling an entire font:
(Be sure to Save first in case you make a mistake.)
1. Choose "Element > Font Info..."
2. The "Font Info" dialog box is displayed. There are two checkboxes near the bottom, "Retain path coordinates..." and "Automatically compute...". Make sure both of these are unchecked.
3. Note the current "Em Square:" value and multiply it by your scaling amount. For example, if the Em Square value is 1000 and the scaling amount is 149%, then 1000 x 1.49 = 1490. Enter the calculated value in the "Em Square:" field and hit "OK".
At this point, the paths are all scaled up, but the Em Square value is wrong. So,
5. Choose "Element > Font Info..."
6. Check the box next to "Retain path coordinates..."
7. Enter the original Em Square value (in the example above it would be 1000) and hit "OK".
Your font is now scaled.
23 Feb 2010 — 1:44pm
That will work, Mark, but I think there's an easier way:
1. In the main window press Ctrl-a to mark all glyphs.
2. In the menu, choose Element/transform.
3. In the popup window choose
a) Center transformations around: Character origin
b) First transformation: Scale uniformly 149 (or whatever) percent.
c) then: do nothing
d) click on the button "transform".
Step 3 a) is important, otherwise the smaller characters will sit somewhere in mid-air if you choose Center of selection instead.
Andreas
23 Feb 2010 — 1:50pm
The advantage of my method is that it also scales the kerning.
24 Feb 2010 — 7:12am
Good point. Mine doesn't (just checked it). I think the reason that I never thought of that is that the fonts I scaled were in such a rough state that they didn't have any (proper) kerning at all.