Re: Poor man's oldstyle figures

[Yannis Haralambous <yannis@fluxus-virus.com>]

On 10/05/99 at 12:31, Thierry.Bouche@ujf-grenoble.fr (Thierry Bouche) wrote:

> » why doesn't fontinst scale poor man's small caps automatically
> » (by dividing xheight/capheight or \height{x} by \height{A} or
> » something)
> 
> If you want to keep the stem weight you need to scale only vertically
> (or scale 90 % horizontally, 65 % vertically, e.g.). But then you
> enter the dark area of font freaking, and you'll realize soon that one
> trick that works in one case won't on another design. For instance,
> the letter o in Futura cannot be anything else than a perfect circle,

I had some very good results by downscaling a semi-bold version of the font.
If you choose the right scaling factor you can get the right stroke width.
but you need to open the font with some utility like Fontographer or FontLab
to mesure that exactly. And this doesn't work well for serifed fonts.
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