Italic letterforms (sans serif)...

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  Craig Eliason Posts: 1,404

  February 11

  https://gaultney.org/jvgtype/italics/designing-italics/
  

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  Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,756

  February 12

  Victor Gaultney’s thesis is great!
  
  Regarding slant and offset.... Basically, if you slant letters for a western italic angle, they end up sticking out to the right and getting away from the left bounds. If you are creating italics by starting with slanted upright letters, after slanting, you need to shift the letters back to the left.
  
  The amount of shift would also be the amount of caret offset to apply.
  
  More on those issues at the 43:32 mark in this video: https://youtu.be/tbc_O7bNROs?si=HN4Vq1Ubb13HzvjM&t=2612

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  jeremy tribby Posts: 220

  February 12 edited February 12

  italic offset can be computed as

  x_shift = -round(tan(italic_angle * pi / 180) * (x_height * 0.5))

  gunnlaugur briem's website is offline I believe but the fontlab site has backed up his method here, which is referenced by gaultney
  

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  Mark Simonson Posts: 1,654

  February 13

  https://web.archive.org/web/20180714143022/http://www.briem.net/
  

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  jeremy tribby Posts: 220

  February 13

  unfortunately I don’t think the wayback machine captured the images for that one (https://web.archive.org/web/20170811182312/http://briem.net/2/2.3.4a/2.3.4.34.curves.htm)

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  George Thomas Posts: 634

  February 13

  Curve Compensation from 2002:

  https://web.archive.org/web/20020330150443/http://briem.ismennt.is/2/2.3.4a/2.3.4.34.curves.htm
  

  
  

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  John Hudson Posts: 2,981

  February 13

  With regard to spacing, the important thing is to establishing a common height between roman (upright) and italic at which to measure sidebearing distance. In a Latin typeface, this is best somewhere around the middle of the distance between the baseline and the x-height. Remember that the important thing is that a word set in italics between two words in roman type should appear optically centred between them.

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  Craig Eliason Posts: 1,404

  February 13

  Do other font editors nowadays use slanted sidebearings like Glyphs has always done, which I find to be an exceedingly convenient graphic representation of the 1/2-x-height convention just alluded to? With slanted boxes, I needn't compute any offsets, but rather just center glyphs in their (parallelogram) boxes, just like I'd do with the uprights.

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  John Hudson Posts: 2,981

  February 13

  Recent versions of FontLab enable slanted virtual sidebearings (I say virtual, because the sidebearings actually written to the font are not slanted). Setting the caret offset value in the font info may remain necessary in some situations, however, e.g. if one wants to maintain compatibility with older versions of a font with a specific caret offset.

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  Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,756

  February 13

  > Do other font editors nowadays use slanted sidebearings like Glyphs has always done
  
  I thought that was pioneered by FontLab VI, and not in Glyphs until after version 2. Am I mistaken?

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  Craig Eliason Posts: 1,404

  February 13

  Thomas Phinney said:

  > Do other font editors nowadays use slanted sidebearings like Glyphs has always done
  
  I thought that was pioneered by FontLab VI, and not in Glyphs until after version 2. Am I mistaken?

  Here's an archived page about Glyphs from 2011 that already notes the slanted bounding box. That's six years or so before FL VI was shipping. 

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  Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,756

  February 13

  Nice!

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