Fontself disregarding baseline when importing punctuation etc

#1

Hi,

First off, great plugin! Worth every penny for sure! :smile:

I couldn’t find an answer for this so I’m asking here. Importing A-Z and a-z worked like a charm but when it came to importing punctuation, Fontself seemed to ignore the baseline etc. So the question mark, for instance, was way below the baseline and the quotation marks were in the middle somewhere – when importing multiple glyphs at the same time. How come? Then I have to manually change all the punctuation so it fits where I want them? I thought the plugin would handle that for me, so all the punctuation would fit exactly where I drew them on the template that came with the plugin. So a comma, which sits a little below the baseline would also sit a little below the baseline when importing it. But that’s not happening. It just rests on the baseline.

I hope I’m making enough sense for you guys to understand my problem. Maybe I’m just not importing correctly or something.

Thanks in advance!
Jonas

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#2

Thanks Jonas, here’s everything about the “smarts” that Fontself does.

Whether you import one or several characters, the baseline is calculated differently:

  • When a single glyph is selected, its fits the baseline to its lowest point.
  • When many objects are selected, a median baseline is calculated (which is why selecting a-z will automatically work fine in most cases).

Your best friend to precisely set the baseline are guides, which can be selected along a shape to define their position. Learn more here: https://help.fontself.com/en/articles/900365-set-font-metrics-with-illustrator-guides

And FYI, the template does not have such smarts in itself for now, so selecting guides is mandatory to define the baseline wherever you want.

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#3

Thanks so much for the reply! I just read in the article you posted that selecting the guides (baseline, descender, ascender) along with the glyphs helps the plugin determine the baseline etc. That seemed to do the trick.

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#4

Just for clarification, selecting the descender & ascender guides is only useful once. Once these values are set, you can simply select shapes & the baseline guide to import other glyphs.

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