Warnings about Ascender & Descender Height

#1

Hello everyone!
I’m new to Fontself and have a few questions about vertical font metrics and guides.

When creating guides for Baseline, Ascender etc., I used the sample lettering from the Welcome Gazette document in Illustrator. But I keep getting warnings that the Ascender is too high or the Descender too low. But if I fixed it according to the Warning, some of the letters, like the “g”-Descender, would be crammed, or go beyond the descender line…
Also, I don’t even know what units are being used, it only says “between -100 and -400”.

How can I know the correct maximum position of the guides before importing glyphs? And what if I want my letters to have longer descenders then suggested?
Also, when I change the line height in the fontself window, can this somehow be adopted to my guides on the artboard?

I’m really sorry if this is a dumb question, but I couldn’t find anything like this in the forum.
Thanks!

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#2

Hey Danny.

I know I’m rrrrrrrrrreally late to the party with this and you’ve most likely got the issue sorted, but its an issue I’ve had a few times and I keep forgetting how to remedy it (thanks @franz for always being so patient and reminding me!)

It really boils down to whether or not you want the aesthetics of your font, or its functionality to be most important. What I mean by that is; does it matter that your font at say 11pt is very similar in size to fonts like Georgia, Verdana, Garamond, Open Sans etc at 11pt…or is the look of your font more important?

If the look is paramount (as is the case with a font I’m currently making), you can use the ‘scale’ button in the FontSelf panel and hit the ‘-’ (minus button) until the warnings disappear.

This will of course make your font much smaller in size than most system fonts, but if you don’t mind users having to set a larger font size than normal, (i.e. your font may require them to set it at 24pt to be roughly the same size as Arial at 11pt) using the scale button is all you really need to do.

Hope that helps
Rian

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