Pixel Font from Illustrator to FontLab
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
4.Mar.2005 7.00pm
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 the size is 8, the "pixels" will be 125 units tall and wide.
BTW, about Unibody: its method of defining pixels is too brute-force. Besides using too many points, the narrow gaps -like any delicate feature in a font- can translate to "discrete noise" (or washed-out blacks) at certain sizes (I mean when it's used outside its "native" size).
hhp
5.Mar.2005 9.51am
Hey Hrant,
I like to design in Illustrator because I can see and edit all the glyphs at once and I find the editing tools easier to use.
Just to make sure I understand, are you saying that when a font renders at 8 pt, for example, it's 8 points from ascender to descender, i.e., the height of the entire Em?
And, yeah, I know what you mean about Unibody. I have seen a few solutions for getting around Flash's no-overlapping-points bug; that's got to be one of the least elegant.
thanks.
5.Mar.2005 11.50am
Yes, the point size equals the em square. The ascender + descender may or may not be the same as the em.
T
5.Mar.2005 8.45pm
Ah, thanks for the clarification.
8.Mar.2005 10.43am
To elaborate s'more:
Don't try to figure in the vertical proportions in the "target point size" of a pixelfont; all the point size determines is the size in units of your building-block "pixels". Unless your vertical span in pixels is more than double the point size, just use an Em of 1000, a point size of 8, and pixels of 125, and ignore the bounds.
hhp
12.Mar.2005 2.31pm
the em is here
<img>
the size of the pixel can be set like this
<img>
the font size
<img>
am i right?
12.Mar.2005 2.42pm
what the hell
i mean
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v723/ingolfr/misc/pixelfont_01_upm.gif
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v723/ingolfr/misc/pixelfont_02_grid.gif
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v723/ingolfr/misc/pixelfont_03_size.gif
is this the right way?
plus can i delete the above posts, sorry about them u.u
12.Mar.2005 3.00pm
Plus make all relevant metric stuff multiples of 125:
hhp
12.Mar.2005 8.15pm
ooh, oh yea. it all fits. thank you mister Papazian. you made it really easy.
its funny cause after all these months of trying to figure out what the deal is with the metrics and ems and pixels. all that the tutorial guys needed to do (for the mathematically challenged) is give a screenshot of what the hell they were talking about.
18.Jun.2007 4.53pm
hello, i have drawn a pixel typeface in illustrator and i did the hinting myself so i have the sizes 7pt up to 12pt each in the correct size as they should appear as a font, that means from top of the ascenders to the bottom line the smallest ones are 8 pixels high, the biggest one is 12 pixels high. Now when i copy the characters into fontlab they become very tiny and scaling doesnt help because the design changes slightly. i have read through the measurement pages but i dont get the trick, does someone know how to configure the fontlab file to have the characters the same size as in illustrator like the 7pt one should be 8 pixels high at 100% but oh god its not.
Help please
19.Jun.2007 1.43pm
Wait a second, you’ve hinted a single outline font to generate multiple bitmap fonts at different sizes?! That’s like the holy grail of pixelfont design... In any case, could you please start a new thread with this post? Here it’s probably going to get lost.
hhp