work performance

Fede Biagioli

hi! Does anyone know or know any shortcut or way to perform the same spacing to all characters with as few actions as possible to improve work performance? (I'm working with FL6). The only way I know, is to apply the spaced glyph to glyph.

The same question is presented to me for kerning and the kerning pairs, although this section is more complex and difficult to be a match between the kerning pairs, is there any apply the same kerning value to more than one glyph? Maybe with scripts?

Thank you all.

Thomas Phinney

For spacing in FontLab VI, there are several ways to do this. See also http://help.fontlab.com/fontlab-vi/Editing-Glyph-Metrics/

Spacing

- Select the desired glyphs, and choose Tools > Actions > Metrics. All sorts of options here. Set Sidebearings is often useful.

Now, that just sets sidebearings once. What if you want to keep the sidebearings the same? You can do that too. For example, select all your accented A glyphs. Go to Window > New Metrics Window. Make sure "Show Metrics Table" is on. In the table click edit the LSB and RSB values to "=A"... you can use copy/paste shortcuts and tab between fields while doing this.

Note also the preference in Preferences > Spacing for "Automatically update linked metrics." This is off by default. Using it in a large font with many linked metrics can slow things down.

Now, see also the Font menu options Update Metrics and....

Link Metrics. Yes, you can ask FontLab to automatically link metrics for you. This is pretty powerful, so you need to look carefully at options, especially if you just tell FontLab to go ahead and do it across the entire font. Up to you whether it should link across writing systems or not, whether it should compare sidebearings or look at shapes, etc.

Kerning

I am running short on time, so for now I will say: start with the general info on kerning here: http://help.fontlab.com/fontlab-vi/Editing-Kerning/

For treating multiple glyphs the same way, you need “class kerning”—see http://help.fontlab.com/fontlab-vi/Using-Kerning-Classes/