Vertical Metrics, Improved Touch Support and More
News | Rob Meek (meek) | May 23rd, 2020
As promised, today we’re introducing a series of new features, enhancements and bug fixes to FontStruct.
Line Height Control (Vertical Metrics)
Until now, FontStruct has automatically calculated the overall line-height and line-spacing for each downloaded font. This is usually fine, but every now and again people request manual control over these values.
Today we’re giving FontStructors this option. To use it, first select “View” and then “Line Height” from the menu (You need to be in Expert Mode):
Two new lines labelled “top” and “bottom” appear on the canvas. You can simply drag these lines to specify a height for the font. The lines snap to 1/8 of a grid square when dragged and dropped and you can click on the little reset button to go back to the default, automatic calculation.
The values which you specify like this will be stored in your downloaded font file. In accordance with the first law of FontStruct – thou shalt not make things unnecessarily complicated – that’s all there is to it!
Please note that a lot of desktop software will still ignore or mangle whatever vertical metrics values are stored in a font file. So you may not always achieve the precise desired effect. For anyone interested, some souls braver than I have researched and documented the history of this mess elsewhere.
Anyway, I think FontStruct’s new feature will suffice to solve many line height problems, and you will find that some desktop software (Glyphs for example) will indeed respect your placement of the new lines.
Improved PhoneStructor (Touch Support in the Editor)
The FontStructor editor and the FontStruct website have been kind of usable on phones and tablets for quite a while now, but in reality, FontStructing on a touch devices has hitherto been cumbersome and impracticable.
With today’s update, we’re adding a series of interface optimisations to significantly improve FontStructing for users of touch devices and small displays, including …
1. Finally, a tap-friendly Menu!
The dropdown menu, which simply didn’t work on touch devices, now does. Note that the “Expert Mode” toggle now appears as part of this menu on small displays.
2. The Toolbar is docked and augmented
To keep it out of the way whilst drawing, the toolbar is now automatically docked to the top of the screen. Some commonly used actions (undo, redo and fullscreen) have also been added for ease of access. Note that the docked toolbar only appears on very small screens (phones in portrait mode), tablets are unaffected.
3. Improved Zoom
Pinch-to-zoom is now possible, making the zoom palette superfluous and so freeing up valuable screen space for drawing.
4. Brick Palette Toggle
The brick palette (My Bricks and All Bricks) can now be toggled with a single tap. This gives you swift access to your bricks while also freeing up more screen space for drawing.
5. Character Selector also works!
Something else which didn’t work properly on touch devices until now was the scroll functionality on the character selector. It does now. We’ve made the arrow buttons and the letter selectors themselves a bit bigger to suit your fingertips, and you can even swipe along the list of characters to scroll through them.
Miscellaneous Fixes and Improvements
In addition to Vertical Metrics controls and improved touch support we’ve also made a number of diverse tweaks to the site and the editor.
1. Spontaneous Brick Swap Fix
This will be familiar to some of you as the worst bug in FontStruct: You save your work, then after reloading it the following day, you find that “gremlins” have swapped out some of your bricks overnight and your design is corrupted.
– This has proved a very difficult bug to reproduce and fix, but we are introducing a change today which hopefully will improve matters. Fingers crossed!
If anyone does experience this problem again in the future, please let us know, especially if you can provide us with detailed steps to reproduce the problem.
2. Cyrillic in the Widget
Recently, more FontStructors have been adding Cyrillic letters to their fonts or making purely Cyrillic designs. We’ve added a Cyrillic preview option to the widget to support this trend. Suggestions for a better Cyrillic sample text are welcome.
3. Links in descriptions
The editor for writing FontStruction descriptions was broken, making it impossible to add proper links in descriptions. That should be fixed now.
4. Comment Removal
You can now remove your own comments for up to one hour after you have made them.
5. Improvements to Glyphs Export
We’ve made a few improvements to the Glyphs Export functionality.
Firstly, we updated the export to work with the latest version of Glyphs.
Secondly we added the FontStruct grid in every export, so you can now continue to reference the same grid in Glyphs.
Thirdly we have made the export behave differently when you are exporting a “pure” pixel font (i.e. one consisting only of pixel bricks and without any filters). When you export a pixel font like this, the exported file will be compatible with the official Glyphs Pixel font plugin, which is actually pretty cool. Now you can move seamlessly from working in FontStruct to working in Glyphs. Thanks to @gingerbreadman and @glyphsapp for encouraging and helping us get this one done.
6. Removal of the “Contribute to Google Fonts” Button.
We love Google Fonts and have benefited greatly from their support in recent years, but we’ve decided to remove this button from the site.
Unfortunately there were technical issues with keeping the functionality working consistently at our end, and overall it did not seem that this form of submission was working very well.
We continue to encourage designers whose work fulfils the Google Font criteria to submit their work for consideration to them, and we will keep the OFL license option (this is the principal requisite license for Google Fonts) as a permanent part of FontStruct.
Future submissions of FontStructions to Google Fonts will have to be made manually and independently of FontStruct.
7. Grid-coordinate Display
This is an experimental one. If you are in “Expert Mode” you will now see the current grid coordinates in the bottom right hand corner of the screen.
8. “Desert rescue” feature
Every now and again someone gets in touch having somehow panned off into the unmapped farther reaches of the grid. They’ve lost all orientation and have no idea where the baseline or origin is.
Clearing the browser cache was the old advice here, but now much more conveniently, you can simply double click or double tap on the “hand” panning tool to return the grid to its default position and find your way home.
That’s It!
Happy FontStructing!
Wow! Thanks for all of the updates to keep FontStruct the premier typepface creation site on the web, Rob. I’m very interested in testing the the Vertical Metrics function on some of my tiny pixel fonts (solid and outline of the same style) — the outline TTF always generated at ½ the point size of the other, even though it was actually 2 pixels taller than the regular FontStruction!
And while the old ‘Delete’ option remains MIA for our own samples posted within in our own FontStruction comments, the 1-hour ‘Delete Comment’ option is a welcome addition… That will give me ~59 minutes to discover the inveitable typos that continuously plague my samples. :^D
– Goatmeal — May 23, 2020 #
Genial! Waiting for try all of them. Thanks one more time, Big Boss Rob Meek!
– Antonio J. Morata — May 23, 2020 #
Just tested it out on the two fonts that have vexed me for almost 10 years, and the generated TTFs for both the pixel outline and the pixel regular fonts match up: both fonts are the same “size” at the same point values in the Windows 7 Font Viewer and in Paint Shop Pro 7. Many thanks, Rob!
– Goatmeal — May 23, 2020 #
Thanks! This should be useful for fonts with vertical filters that are not 1 and do not like a lot of vertical spacing between lines…
– BWM — May 23, 2020 #
At switching from mobile mode to wide mode it happens that the lines (baseline, guides) dissapear on the right side of the canvas. Another point is that the height adjustment does not work well for me in the previews (both at Chromium browser). But thanks a lot for the new functions!
– mgUdit — May 24, 2020 #
That’s true. The vertical metrics lines aren’t respected by the preview in the FontStructor itself or the widget. That will be fixed later.
– Rob Meek (meek) — May 24, 2020 #
Awesome news. Glad to hear of the updates. Was the blown-out quarter-turn curved end brick ever fixed in the outline bricks (in the connect blocks), per chance? I’m busy at the moment (setting up links to FontStruct from one of my websites I am about to publish), but I’ll check it later if I don’t hear anything.
P.S.: Thanks for the updates!
– SymbioticDesign — May 25, 2020 #
Oh yesss the vertical adjustment was long overdue to be honest, and the implementation is pretty much perfect.
In the future, I’d love to see some aspects of the mobile UI to be implemented in the full version, as an optional feature. I like my toolbars pinned to the edge instead of floating ;). Imagine all the toolbar items centered and horizontal? Would be cool – because right now the floating windows can obstruct bricks, especially if a missclick occurs, so you’ll never know if there’s a brick hiding underneath (could also be solved with semi transparency). Also with the mobile improvements, I’ll never be not using FontStruct.
Great to hear about important bug fixes too. This reminds me – I switched ad blocking extensions recently, gotta add an exception to FontStruct, so that you can keep the fantastic work.
– Neoqueto — May 25, 2020 #
Oh and by the way, I see that the mobile site is still a WIP, as it needs different dropdown menus. 3rd level menus are cut-off in half on my OnePlus 6 (1080×2280), which makes nudging a bit of a pain. And nudging done via menus exclusively is a struggle on its own. But baby steps, right? Regardless, it’s definitely a lot better than it used to be.
link to screenshot
– Neoqueto — May 25, 2020 #
@Neoqueto yes, always work in progress.
@Symbiotic the blown-out brick is a Chromium bug (I filed it). The brick should be ok in a downloaded font and probably the gallery as well although I haven’t checked.
– Rob Meek (meek) — May 26, 2020 #
Yay!
– architaraz — May 26, 2020 #