This follows on from my original post detailing the original sketches and tracing in illustrator.

Now I have the capital letters for this font set up I need to calculate the cap height, x-height, ascender and descender. As I am only doing the caps for this release that makes life a bit easier but I will still calculate the other heights for when I finish the rest of the font collection.

To help me with this I used a great guide from Haiku Monkey Foundry and I will use the same methods for my font to make sure it works in FontLab.

I have set up guides for the measurements I need, it does not matter at this point what measurements your using, I’m working with millimeters. FontLab measures its fonts in UPM, or “Units Per em,” so we need to convert our font from illustrator to FontLab measurements.

“The first step is to measure the “em square” (the height from the descender to the ascender of your typeface) in Illustrator.

So in this case my ascender and caps sit at 234 mm, my baseline sits at 34mm and my x-height is 174mm. This means my ‘em square’ will be 200 (234-34). At this point I’ll also work out my other measurements as follows. The standard Units Per em in FontLab is 1000 so we’ll use that in the calculations to get the final figures we need.

Sweet, now I have the measurements we can open a new illustrator document (using points as measurements) and set the guides we need. Use the specific guide tool to set them at the exact point guide.

No we are set to copy our fonts over from the original Illustrator file and re-size them according to our calculations.

We are not far away now! Fire up FontLab, set up a new FontLab document, then go to font info, navigate to metrics and dimensions settings and and choose key dimensions. Now set the Ascender, Descender, Caps Height, and X-Height values accoring to the calculations you made above.

Now you can go ahead and paste all your letters in from illustrator and create you font face!

The font can be downloaded here, remember this is only the capitals, I will update this file over the coming weeks with lower case and other characters when I get the chance.

I will continue to update it with all the character sets over the next few week’s so keep checking back if you want to use it. It is my first attempt at a full font face so please don’t be to negative!!

Many thanks to Alec Julien at Haiku Monkey Foundry for the tutorial I based this on and please visit his guide as it is a lot more in depth and explains it better than me!