Hello - and sorry for what seems to be a very stupid question.
I have been making fonts for a couple of years now and I have uploaded most of my 500+ fonts to the sites of various resellers. Sales were good, so right now it is my full time job.
Some time ago, Myfonts/Monotype released a new font uploader, which I still call Prosper (after its test name). In fact, I was one of the people who were asked to try out this new gizmo to weed out any bugs and glitches.
So far so good. There were bugs, there were glitches, but in the end a workable uploader was presented.
I am not a tech-person and most of the typographic terms are beyond me. I learned the ins and outs of Fontlab Studio (5) myself, with the help of some tutorials which you can find on the web. It was a lot of trial and error and I cannot count the many moments of sheer frustration, but in the end Fontlab Studio and I tolerated each other. I still don't know exactly what I am doing, but at least Fontlab Studio lets me export fonts that work. And I never get complaints, nor are my fonts rejected.
Again, so far so good.
BUT (here it comes): Myfonts Prosper, in the last week or so, has been rejecting ALL of my new fonts for reasons I cannot understand. Apparently there seems to be an issue with my vertical metrics, which results in clipping (???). See? I told you, I am not a tech person.
This is what Prosper says:
"
We've tested your fonts to ensure that when used on Windows, the acsenders and descenders will not appear clipped or cut off. It is good practice to ensure that your vertical metrics also accomodate your diacritics."
This is what I have: typoAscender at 750 and TypoDescender at -250 (=1000 UPM). I always thought that these values were not that important, but it seems this is where the heart of the problem lies.
Please forgive my lack of knowledge, but if anyone can help me solve this, I would be very grateful!
So, my question is:
1. What IS the problem?
2. How can I fix it?
3. Should I change my settings?
4. What should I change them to?
5. Should I just pack up and leave?
Thanks. I am very frustrated right now, so you're not catching me at the most opportune of times.
Comments
So I just increased the number for WinAscent (it was 1029, I made it 1200). Saved under a different name, exported as OTF and uploaded to Myfonts.
drum roll
it works. At least, Prosper accepts it!
But that really can't be the way to do it. I mean, it is cheating - sort of.
It does seem silly to just punch in a higher number and you're home free...
Thanks for that insight, Khaled!!
The problem with just increasing the values arbitrarily is that applications like Word rely on those values to determine not only cut off, but also default line height. So increasing it randomly means your type will have really large line gaps.
MyFonts said to me on Friday -
We’ve recently made some changes to the validator
We are going to make some of the red errors into warnings so that the fonts can make it through for review while we evaluate how we’re testing each of these important characteristics! ...I will follow up with you once this change has been made
Got same answer from MyFonts.
As I understood it, this "issue" will be still issue, just not as red one (declining one), but as yellow one (that informs you that there might be problems with it once).
I use High-Logic's FontCreator. It has the flag, but I don't have any idea whether it would affect the Prosper issue or not.
https://github.com/fonttools/fonttools