User Guide

The Bitmap Window in Fontographer 4.1 includes
maximum ascender and descender lines. These lines
represent the limits for bitmap placement based upon the
outlines for all existing characters. You’ll find these guides
valuable when you are manually creating bitmaps. The
maximum ascender line only appears when a character’s
outline extends below the descender line. However, if you
have selected to preserve line spacing (in the Recalc
Bitmaps dialog), the maximum ascender and descender
lines will not appear for that character, they will be the
same as the normal ascender and descender lines.
Offset and width values
The offset is the distance in pixels from the left-most black
pixel to the origin line. This value changes as you edit the
bitmap character. If there are no points between these two,
the offset is zero.
There are 0 pixels between the origin and the left edge of
the letter “T” pictured above. The width indicator shows us
the width of the character in pixels: The “T” is 13 pixels
wide.
Visible layers
You can choose to display or hide guidelines in the Bitmap
Window by typing “Option-G” or “G” (on the PC). The
guidelines you will see are the ascent, descent, and baseline
of the font. Use them in the Bitmap Window as a drawing
aid.
To display or hide the Outline layer, type “Option-O” or “O”
(on the PC). The outline is visible behind the bitmap, and
you can use it as an aid in bitmap editing, but no changes to
the Outline can be made in this layer. Changes to the
outline character will, however, display in the Bitmap
Fontographer User's Manual
4: Editing Bitmaps Page #6