Font Line spacing Kerning in GUI system

How do we get access to the line spacing and kerning settings for fonts? I can see the values in there when I click on a font, but I cannot see how to adjust them.

I cant find anything in the scripting docs

Please tell me I am able to adjust the kerning and line spacing?

 

Aren't those values part of the font itself?

 

Possibly, but if the values are shown (greyed out though) then we should be able to adjust them.

We NEED to be able to adjust them to be able to format multi-line text better.

 

Nicolas... Any thoughts or insights on this?

 

You can change those values for bitmap fonts, but not for fonts imported from a TTF file. It's a bit of a pain to rig a bitmap font for usage, since you'll need to rebuild all kerning values.

 

Bummer... so how do I fix a problem like this... ?



From using a TTF ?

 

Change the kerning and spacing in the TTF file with a font editor.

--Eric

 

Thanks Eric... can u recommend one? I a still pretty new to the Mac.

 

I'm not Eric and I haven't used it in a while, but TypeTool would probably get the job done. It might be a bit overkill though if all you wanna do is change the line spacing.

 

I have FontForge, which is free, but rather complicated and needs X11.

--Eric

 

Ok, nps... am downloading the TypeTool demo now... Thanks TOLM.

 

It's not cheap, but FontLab Studio is probably the best mac font creation/editor out there. It's probably overkill for small tweaks like this, but for anything more complex it's great.

 

I think you can get quite a long way just with TypeTool. It's essentially FontLab Studio without all that advanced OpenType stuff you won't use anyway.

 

I downloaded the TypeTool demo loaded my font in but couldn't make heads or tails about how to use it how to adjust line spacing/line height.

The font looks fine inside TypeTool, just not so great in Unity as showcased above.

 

I think what you need to do is open "Font Info" from the File menu, and play around with metrics and dimensions. There isn't a line height metric specifically, but you could try changing the UPM size without scaling the glyphs or perhaps increasing the ascender or caps height.

 

Unity uses the FreeType library for rendering TrueType to bitmaps. It reads the font metrics from the TTF. Lots of fonts, especially low-end novelty fonts, end up having poorly specified metrics. I've seen this in Flash as well that the line spacing, etc., isn't good for some fonts.

So it's not Unity's fault exactly.

FreeType does make its own decisions about how to interpret the metrics.

Something else you'll see sometimes is that the line spacing will change depending on whether you import as Unicode or ASCII. Some Unicode characters in some fonts take up more line height and end up with a different line spacing in the bitmap as a result.

 

Hehe oh the joys of standards.

 

Silly me. I didn't realize that Type Tool was from the same company...doh.

 

has it been already solved?

If not, it can be dealt with FontForge.

Take a look at HERE.

 

Just FWIW, nowadays you can simply use this ...

http://docs.unity3d.com/462/Documentation/ScriptReference/UI.Text-lineSpacing.html

in UI.Text

 

That is for line spacing, not character spacing.