hhsoli.blogg.se - Fontforge baseline

FONTFORGE BASELINE PC
FONTFORGE BASELINE PLUS

Align these 7 points to the edge of the grid (with all 7 still selected):.

Drag the 7 points to near the left edge of the grid rectangle.

Select all left-side points of the 7 lines with a selection rectangle (or shift-clicking).

Stretch the lines closer to the left edge of the grid:.

Caution: If you touch the rectangle, the point will become a point on the rectangle instead of a new entity.

For an 8×8 grid, draw 7 lines inside- but not touching-the rectangle:.

Caution: Be sure to get your math right for even subdivision of the grid later on.

FONTFORGE BASELINE PLUS

Hint: You can navigate between the points in the Get Info window with the Prev and Next buttons (Alt+P and Alt+N, plus Alt+B).

upper left: 100, 800 (I chose a left margin of 100 units).

Right-click a point, and select “Get info”:.

Manually edit the points of the rectangle:.

Select the Rectangle tool and draw a rectangle roughly the size of the intended grid.

Open a glyph for editing and switch to the Guide layer to draw the grid.

Not required, but turning on Snap-To-Integer is normally a good idea for this work (File > Preferences > Editing > SnapToInt).

If I make each grid space 50×100 units, then that adds up to an overall grid dimension of 400×800 units. To keep it interesting (because I’m adding blocky glyphs to a non-blocky font), I want the grid to occupy most of the space… but not all of it (perhaps a 100-unit margin, or so, on all sides). In my example here, I will draw an 8×8 grid with rectangular spaces inside a 600×1024 glyph.

Anyhow, adjust your em height and conversion point size accordingly. I suppose 700 ascent, 100 descent, would have also worked, but that wasn’t the spec for this font (it should be 900 tall). Of course, nothing else may space your font well with a 0 descent… but nice vertical spacing isn’t the goal with GameMaker conversions. I still draw descenders and they convert fine. Setting point size to 5 then generates a perfect pixel for each 100 units. Side note: I have found that a good em height for TTF-to-bitmap generation in GameMaker is 800 (800 ascent, 0 descent).

FONTFORGE BASELINE PC

If you want to first test fonts that don’t follow the power-of-2 tradition, I have noticed that fonts from The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack don’t bother with it. You might also break the power-of-2-em-height tradition, to make the math easier on yourself, by setting the em height to 1600 or whatever works for you (and ignore the warnings FontForge will present about this… at your own risk of course). For example, a 1152×2048 glyph (1792 ascent, 256 descent) can be evenly divided into a 9×16 grid with each space being 128×128. In most cases, such as when the entire glyph set is to be blocky, you probably want to fill the entire em height and glyph width with the grid. This method was adapted from Scindix’s response to the above post but doesn’t involve scaling down and back up (which may not always be an option, or work that well) and is otherwise simplified a bit (with some basic math skills required). Note: TrueType fonts, however, have a tradition that the em size should be a power of 2 (as in 8, 16, 32, etc.) which is pretty limiting when hoping for a small grid to work on. Set the em size to, basically, how tall you want your characters to be in “pixels” such as 10, 12, 18, or whatever. If starting a new font from scratch, you have the easy option of setting a very small em size (in Element > Font Info > General > Em Size) and turning on Snap-To-Integer (in File > Preferences > Editing > SnapToInt). Thus, given that a vectored grid feature will likely never appear in FontForge (presumably because fancy fonts rely more on custom guidelines than a grid), I will attempt to explain the simplest way(s) to make or fake a snap-to grid in FontForge. Furthermore, the popularity of FontStruct also indicates a demand for the simplicity of designing fonts based on a grid layout. The rising popularity of retro, 8-bit graphics seems to also be increasing demand for bitmap-like or pixelated fonts.