Haiku Monkey

Illustrator offers powerful drawing tools and an endless array of brushes that make it easy and fruitful to draw letterforms. But once you’ve done your work in Illustrator, you are going to face the issue of getting your vectors from Illustrator into FontLab. You can just copy and paste your letterforms, but if you’ve ever done this you realize that the scaling from Illustrator to FontLab can be way off. Here’s a way to get precision scaling going from Illustrator to FontLab. (This is essentially an illustrated version of the method outlined in the FontLab manual.)

Setting the Stage

I’m going to assume that you’ve already drawn your letterforms in Illustrator.

The next step is to measure your drawings, along all of the important vertical metric measures: baseline, descender, x-height, caps-height, and ascender. Here’s a visual refresher on those metrics:

Make sure your rulers are showing in Illustrator (ctrl-R), and drag some guides from the top ruler to all of the key heights of your forms:

In this illustration, I’m using millimeters as my units, but you can use whatever you’re comfortable with.

A Little Math

Note the position of each of your guides, and write them down, as you’ll be doing some gentle math with them in short order. Here’s the basic idea: FontLab measures its fonts in terms of UPM, or “Units Per eM,” and so we have to find a way to go from whatever units you’re using in Illustrator to UPM. The first step is to measure the “em square” (the height from the descender to the ascender of your typeface) in Illustrator. The em square of this example is 60 millimeters, since the distance from the ascender (at 208) to the descender (at 148) is 60. While we’re at it, let’s measure the rest of the vertical metrics in our Illustrator units:

Now the standard UPM size in FontLab is 1000, so let’s use that in our further calculations:

A New Illustrator Document

These numbers are going to be the heights of our guides for a new Illustrator document that we will use for copying and pasting glyphs from Illustrator to FontLab. So let’s create a new Illustrator document, in points, with the height of 1000 + the length of your descender. In this case, 1000 + 317 = 1317.

Next, we have to put our guides into place. Make sure your guides are not locked, and drag a vertical guide to somewhere near the value of your descender length. You can select your guide, and then click on the “transform” link to set the exact value.

Once that guide is set, you’ll need to place a horizontal guide at zero. Then you’ll click on the upper left corner where the two rulers intersect, and drag to the intersection of zero and (in this case) 317. This sets your zero point for your rulers.

Now you can place more guides, according to the numbers for ascender, caps-height, and x-height that you calculated earlier.

Now you can go back to your Illustrator document in which your new typeface drawings reside. Select your “A” and copy it. Then switch back to your new guideline document and paste the “A” into it.

It’s the wrong size, but this is easy to remedy, thanks to our handy guides. Click on the form, hold down the shift key (to make sure you resize the shape proportionately), and resize so that the shape conforms to your guides.

Almost there!

Now we need a new FontLab file. Go ahead and create one, and then go to the File menu, select “Font Info,” expand the “Metrics and Dimensions” node, and click on the “Key Dimensions” option. Set the Ascender, Descender, Caps Height, and X-Height values to (in this case) 683, -317, 617, and 300.

Now go back to Illustrator, select your newly sized “A”, and copy it. Go back to FontLab, open up your “A” glyph window, and paste.

Voila! A perfectly sized glyph.