0:00 Hi, I'm Stephen and I make fonts as arrow type. Thanks for joining. Today is going to be more of a tutorial and I'm going to try to keep it as concise and focused as I can. Um that said, it's a slightly potentially complex topic. So I'll also try to explain it um as best I can uh within you know a short amount of time here. So, um, this is a very common problem where maybe you've designed most of a font or all of a font and then you realize like, wait a minute, this if I compare it to other fonts feels way too big or way too small. Um, this is a really common thing. You might have drawn a script type face and you can't really just base the um, cap height on a
0:48 standard font in that case. So, how do you scale to make it more hit what you want? So, um I've prepared a test sample here, um that looks like this at 100 points. And obviously, we're really zoomed in. Um and then this is named Sands, one of my fonts, and it looks like this at 100 points. And these are visually incredibly different, obviously. Um so, we're going to fix that. But first, uh it's also worth thinking about like, you know, common system fonts. Um, so Times New Roman, Alvetica, Zapino, and Courier New. These are all at 100 points right here. Um, same f same same font size, but they are very differently sized. Um, so, you know, between these two, it's not that
1:34 big of a difference, but this is, you know, substantially smaller maybe. Um, and then this is this is huge. Um, so yeah, it's pretty common with a uh with a script font to be a bit of a challenge um like how do you size it? It doesn't really make sense to just totally size it to the same cap height as these other fonts um because then it kind of maybe looks a little small comparatively. So um yeah, sometimes the answer is somewhere in between or something, but um yeah, so maybe when this is at about 80 points, it starts to look good. Well, um let's go and and solve it. So um the
2:21 first thing is I I set the font that I'm working on versus a target font or control font and I set them at 100 points. And then I change this one until it looks um about right. So let's bring it up. And uh sometimes it helps to like, you know, if it's as clear-cut as this where it's kind of normal proportions uh xite to cap height, you can get pretty darn close. And um yeah, so here I've found that um my work in progress font uh looks about the right size when it's 125 points uh or 125%
3:08 uh its previous scale or you know 25% bigger and we're going to fix it and demonstrate the fix and then I'll kind of try to say why it's working. Um so to calculate uh what we want to do um it's [clears throat] kind of a divided by b equals c. So size a like 100 points divided by the size we had to move to 125 equals I don't know what to call it so I'm going to call it the crop two or the crop factor. Um, so if we look at it, 100 divided by 125 is 0.8. Um, I guess we want to multiply that by the UPM that this test font is currently at.
3:56 Um, which it's using a standard UPM of 1,00. Um, so this gives us 800. Uh, hey, editor Stephen here. Uh, chipping in to say that the previous equation was maybe a little halfbaked. Um, and this is probably a better representation of it. So, you take size A divided by size B times your original UPM equals the new probably temporary UPM. So, in the case of that example font, it's 100 divided by 125 because that's what we scaled up to to make it the same visual size. Um, and then we're multiplying that by 1,000, the original UPM, to get 800. Um, so back to the video. So, in glyphs app,
4:45 we have our font here, and this is font info. Um, and here it's at 1,00 units per m. There's two ways we could change this. We can change the UPM here or we can click these arrows and it says scale to new UPM. We actually want to use both of these. Um, so first of all, we can just say 800 and that would actually fix it already. Um but um then it would be a slightly non-standard UPM and there are very occasional slight um like printer bugs and things that can happen from using a non-standard UPM. So the second step uh
5:32 that is usually good. It's also going to be slightly different to work with in like kerning editors or whatever. So that's kind of annoying. Um, so, uh, scale font to new UPM. We scale back to the original. And let's, um, give this a name. Uh, we're going to call it size example B. We're going to save it and just do a quick export right into our fonts, uh, library folder. And then we can go up here, back to it, and let's set these both back to 100 points. This one's at 100 points. So, we're
6:17 going to find size example B. And boom. You can see that it's still at 100 points, but it's now the body sizing we wanted it to be to match kind of normal fonts. Hey, stepping in one more time to say that this also works in the other direction. So, if you've got a font that visually looks too large, like Zepino is an example of that. Um, that you can do this process as well, the equation remains the same. Um, it just means that because the larger font goes down to say 80 points in the case of Zapino, uh, that's about where I think it matches in size to normal fonts. Um, and I'm not going to change it, of course. But, um, if I were the font
7:02 engineer on this project, I would have probably done this. Um, you take size A divided by size B times the original UPM, and that's your new temporary UPM, and then you scale back to 1,00 or whatever the original was. Um, and that changes the size. So, why is this working? Um, it's useful to consider what the UPM of a font really is. Um, oh, that doesn't work. Um, the UPM of a font, I think of it as the grid you're drawing on. I mean, it literally is the grid you're drawing on, but I think of it in terms of like if you're if you're drawing in a notebook that's a grided page, um, that grid is the resolution you are using to draw. And um you could
7:51 have 10 divisions in there or you could have 5,000 divisions in there. Um the standard 1,000 UPM for fonts is kind of like a grided notebook page with 1,000 divisions. Um so here's an example where there are 100 divisions um in here. And uh the cropping we're doing is like taking this and just like uh let's change it to um yeah it's just like cropping it basically. Um like that. And then the next step of scaling it back to the original 1000 is like grabbing this guy and doing this.
8:37 And so then when it's uh put onto a a font using application like Illustrator um it's scaling from that 1,00 UPM up to whatever you tell it to be. So yeah, the font size is literally like um how large that UPM is. So, this font now has 1,000 divisions within its 100 point size. This font also has 1,000 divisions within its 100 point size. Um, some fonts have different UPMs. So, for instance, I believe Helvetica has a UPM of 248, which is also pretty common. Um, that has
9:24 148 divisions within this 100 points. And if we changed this, by the way, of course, to, you know, um let's change it to test uh 500, it's just going to have 1,000 divisions within this 500 points. Um, so it's a little kind of a mind trip to consider how scaling works in fonts, but um, yeah, you're setting up the resolution you're working at. Um, so you can place those points and if you crop that in and then scale it up, that will scale the relative size of your font. Uh, the one other question you might have about this process is like, doesn't that round a bunch of coordinate points and mess with the drawing? Um, often it does round
10:12 your coordinate points. Um, but I've been really surprised, pleasantly surprised with how well this works and how little it disrupts the uh, visual appearance of the font and the curves. Everything stays pretty well intact. If you want to be extra careful, you could um, scale the font UPM up to say 4,000. Um, if this is like if you've got an extreme hairline script design going, um, you could scale it up to 4,000 uh or 4,96. Um, and then do this process and that would basically give you a much higher resolution uh, system to work within. So any rounding would be reduced a lot. But
11:00 that might be getting too technical here. Um, anyway, I figured people would wonder that question. It's a natural question of wonder here. Uh so I wanted to speak to it. Yeah. Hopefully that helps you. If uh this is a problem you happen to face, I should give [clears throat] the like disclaimer that if you're trying to scale somebody else's font, uh you should refer to the licensing on whether you're allowed to do that. Um legally speaking, um usually if you've bought a commercial font, you have agreed to uh licensing that says you won't modify the font files. Um, that's the case with every font license I know of. The big exception is open source fonts. Those you are usually allowed to um, you know, edit them to
11:45 your heart's content. And so if you wanted to scale the body sizing of Open Sands, for instance, which is open source under the OFL license, I think, um, you're able to do that. So you probably wouldn't want to do that specific modification because it's already pretty much a normal size, but yeah. Um, that's just worth knowing, you know, don't edit things if you've agreed not to. Um, and otherwise, yeah, hopefully that helps. Hope you're working on something creative, uh, or interesting or that is a puzzle that you're enjoying solving. Uh, hope you're having a good day. Thanks for stopping by.
