Is there a way that I could align some things in fontlab? A tool that gives the possibility to center, left or right align, bottom align as Illustrator do. For instance, select the circumflex accent and the caps A and ask for align center. Your tips will be helpful. Thanks
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@ Jan: I will try this suggestion. Thanks
The first composite glyph is a ghost of A and you don’t have to center that one, since it gets its side bearing from the key glyph A.
The second is the circumflex accent which also is a component, and that one is centered by default when making the glyph ‘Acircumflex’ by double clicking the empty spot for the glyph.
After that, you can of course center components by CTRL-clicking on them if they move out of place.
That gray cell with the template character image is an empty spot for a character. (Except I like to call them slots instead of spots.) If you double-click on an empty spot like that, FontLab will automatically build the composite for you. (It took me years to discover this little trick, so don't feel bad if you didn't know it.)
@ Göran: I have to learn about alias.dat file.
The Fontlab manual has nice detailed instructions on how to use them.
If you select a component in a composite glyph, then use control-click [Mac] to get a contextual menu, you’ll see a Center command, which will center the component horizontally on the advance width.
With this, you can potentially get around Nick’s cut and repaste method above (assuming you’re dealing only with components and not outlines).
In the original example, if you have a capital A component and a circumflex component, you can select each in turn and center. They will then be centered on each other and within the glyph width.
Then, if the composite glyph as a whole is not intended to be centered, you can select the base component and control-click again and select Copy Metrics to restore the sidebearings from the base glyph.
All this assumes that your composite wasn’t pre-built centered, as previously discussed. And this is still a far cry from the kind of Illustrator-like align commands that were originally being sought.
But since we’re talking techniques . . .
I mean, with acute it depends what “l” is like, with grave, “f”. So until you see the accented characters in text, it’s hard to know what will be right.
Rather than double-clicking blank glyphs I use "generate" and copy+paste from a text file with something like...
A+acute=Aacute
a+acute=aacute
A+breve=Abreve
a+breve=abreve
A+circumflex=Acircumflex
a+circumflex=acircumflex
A+dieresis=Adieresis
a+dieresis=adieresis
etc.
It's much easier to parse than alias.dat and I can customize it on-the-fly. I've got pre-made sets for regular, all caps, small caps, Cyrillic, Vietnamese etc.
You can use the alignment controls Jan mentioned earlier.