Braille ADA Compliant Spacing & Positioning of Dots

[esaeo]

I’m trying to create a braille font to be ADA compliant. I cannot seem to establish a clear and consistent rectangle around the braille dot-set so that the spacing is exactly equal regardless of there being one column of dots or two. Without the consistent rectangle defining the space that the dot-set is in there is no way to determine if any dot(s) occupying only one column is on the left or the right column.

So, for example: The letter “A” is a single dot in the upper left corner in a 2x3 grid, and the remaining 5 dots are non-existant but their spacing held. No matter what I do, Fontself sets the left and right spacing relative to that one dot centered. I cannot have that. It has to be leftish within a monospaced rectangle consistent for all characters.

How do I ensure consistent glyph width while still maintaining the void dot areas? There can be no vectors in those areas.

[urs7000]

Good morning,
I have found two ways to solve the problem for letters like ‘A’:

1. dirty trick with a micro rectangle
   ® Place a rectangle with 0.01 mm edge length at the right edge of the grid of ‘A’, ‘B’ and wherever necessary. Then create the character set as usual. The micro rectangle is so small that it is hardly noticeable. Note: with 0.001 mm the rectangle is deleted by Fontself and thus the problem remains.
   

   

2. calculate the correct margins by hand and enter the values
   (A) Create the character set as usual and click on ‘Advanced’.
   

   

(B) Change the width with ‘mono’, …
© enter 1000 as the width for all letters and …
(D) confirm with Klcik on ‘Mono Space’.

To make the points of ‘A’ and ‘B’ left-aligned, the margins ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ must be changed.
Left of ‘A’ must be like ‘C’ 251. Then, for the letter to remain 1000 wide, the value of Right ‘A’ must be 583. So enter 251 for Left and 583 for Right at ‘A’ and ‘B’.
If a letter must be right-aligned, then the other way round.

Click on ‘Home’ to see the change in Fontself and on ‘Save’ or ‘Install’ (AI mac) to check it with the letters ‘AB’ wrap ‘CD’.

I have both AI files and fonts for the letters ‘A’ to ‘I’ in the attachment as an AI 10 file.

Enjoy it.

Braille-Tricks.zip (3.0 MB)