What is your practice in positioning mark anchors? Do you set them on the baseline/x-height/cap height, or slightly below/above?
This will probably depend on the design, but generally, do you adjust the position to overshoots?
One thing is that placing the anchor over a node hinders its selection (in FontLab and FontForge, at least). Placing on height different than a guideline implies having to remember or check what the height should be (or adding a new guide...).
So I place the anchors on x-height/cap height/ascender height, baseline, and descender line mostly, and design the marks as though positioned over an x-height letter or below a non-descending letter for bottom marks. If your approach is different, what are your reasons? I think I've seen fonts with the anchors mid-way between the letter and mark, are there any particular merits to such approach?
Lastly, does the chosen strategy affect the final result for different base and mark combinations?
Comments
I don't position them differently for overshoots normally. If overshoots are a problem, the accents are probably too close to the base character.
I see people put anchors above the metrics lines, presumably because in some font editors, there is a problem selecting an anchor if it is to closed to a node. But then you might like to switch to a different tool
This is much more important for Arabic or Indic typefaces where accents might be on different levels. And that becomes muddy when you start varying the height in the base glyph.
On my most recent project, I went with something offset 150/2000 from the x-height/cap-height/baseline, because that was the FontLab VI default, and it was just slightly easier not to change the vertical position of each anchor, after creating it.
The oddball height has not often been a problem or complication, but ... sometimes it is.
In my next project, I shall definitely stick with staying right on the vertical metrics in the base glyph. Then the offset within the diacritic reflects the actual amount of distance between it and the base glyph ... all good.
I wish software developers creating type design programs wouldn't be as naive to think that type designers only work in a single application, albeit theirs. This sometimes isn't the case and a broader approach should be taken to see what conventions exist, why they exist, and question if you're building on these conventions or just changing them cause you can. **end rant**
Cap height for all cap anchors (with 'top.case')
x-height for all lowercase anchors (with 'top' )
small cap height for all small cap anchors if required (with 'top.sc')
Additional anchors are often required for specific cases (thee /Lcaron/ and /y with dot below/). Sometimes manually positioning a component is easier than using anchors.
Anchors become somewhat more complex when dealing with non-Latins.
*edited due to grammatical error.