[TxMt] Re: Fixing Consolas's line-height

[Matt Bauman]

On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 4:52 PM, Gerd Knops <gerti-textmate at bitart.com> wrote:
>
> What software did you use to edit that font?

After stumbling through a few random search pages, I discovered that
Apple has a suite of command line font editing tools.  Well, the tools
themselves don't do the editing; rather they extract the truetype data
into plain text (xml) tables that you can edit and then 'fuse' back
into the font.

Grab the tools here: http://developer.apple.com/FONTS/OSXTools.html

It installs the tools into /usr/bin and the documentation into
/Developer/Documentation/FontTools.

I did all this with an uninstalled font outside of the */Library/Fonts
directory.  OS X is much more robust with font management, but a
corrupt font can still really mess stuff up.  So continue at your own
risk...

Fire up Terminal, and navigate to the folder where you moved the
Consolas*.ttf fonts.  Now, you want to dump (-A d) the 'hhea' table
(-t) into an editable xml file:

ftxdumperfuser -t hhea -A d Consolas.ttf

This creates an xml file in that directory titled Consolas.hhea.xml.
Now you can edit the table parameters.  And then fuse (-A f) it back
into the font:

ftxdumperfuser -t hhea -A f Consolas.ttf

Repeat for each member of the family, and you're done!

It's a pretty cool suite.  Emboldened by my success, I decided to
modify a few glyphs that had been bugging me.  I had previously tried
to edit the TTF using the free FontForge... but never had any success
recompiling it back into a complete proper font -- it always failed
Font Book's validation and often would display gibberish.  With the
'glyf' table, you can edit the raw hex that describes the contours of
each glyph.  So, I edited the glyphs I wanted in FontForge, and
exported the TTF.  The font file didn't work as a whole, but it still
contained all the proper glyf information.  I dumped the glyph info,
grabbed the one I wanted, subbed it into the dump from the original,
and fused it back together.   And it worked!  Now I have a proper
baseline, and a Monaco style 'l' without the lower left serif (and the
'i,' too, for consistency).

Again, probably not kosher... so be careful how you end up using the font.
Matt