I'm working on a monospace design and after creating the diacritic marks I'm running into the issue of diacritics overlapping other characters due to shallow line-space. I've attached a screengrab showing what it looks like in an application like InDesign (not as bad, only happens on descenders) and notepad/text edit (really bad, happens at baseline).
I believe the topic I should be researching to solve the issue is
vertical metrics, however I'm deeply confused from what I've read on other threads here, and articles like this one on
Glyphs or this one on
best practices.
Some info about the design that may help to troubleshoot...- Design app = RoboFont
- UPM = 1000
- Fixed width = 700
- Cap height = 700
- Ascender = 750
- Descender = -166
A couple things I think I could adjust to fix the issue are:- potentially adjusting the ascender and descender values (not altering design of any glyphs)
- adjusting lineGap value, currently set to default of 200
- mess with the hhea and os/2 table (like in articles mentioned above)
Advice would be greatly appreciated.
Comments
there is a table there with the relevant parameters you’ll need in UFO format, which should suit your needs in robofont
One recommendation for Latin fonts is to draw/test this one character prior to finalizing your vertical metrics, even if you do not otherwise need it, because you do not intend to support Vietnamese in your initial release version! That way if the font is later upgraded to such support, the metrics are already set correctly to handle it.
@Thomas Phinney are you saying the vertical metrics cannot be changed at any time?
I was under the impression you can update them after you have drawn all glyphs and accents and are happy with your design.
You can, of course, change vertical metrics in an already-shipping font, but not without potential changes in user document/websites (or differences between different users of “the same” font on the same project), and reflow because of it. What exactly happens will vary depending on the change and the client app, and sometimes even on how the document was formatted (Word’s “single spacing” is more sensitive to metrics changes than if you specify points-based spacing). Thus foundries and type designers have reasons to avoid it when possible.