This menu is not present in the Metrics View.
PfaEdit deals in pixel sizes, not point sizes. The conversion between pixels and points differs on different systems and indeed on different screens. A point is (approximately) 1/72 of an inch, a pixel is however big a pixel happens to be on your screen. Usually pixels range from about 1/72 of an inch to about 1/144 of an inch. Different systems support different screen resolutions as "standard", and PfaEdit tries to know about these standards.
Screen Resolution |
72dpi Mac |
75dpi X |
96dpi Win |
100dpi X |
120dpi Win |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
10pt | 10 | 10 | 13 | 14 | 17 |
12pt | 12 | 12~13 | 16 | 17 | 20 |
18pt | 18 | 19 | 24 | 25 | 30 |
24pt | 24 | 25 | 32 | 33 | 40 |
Sadly your screen will probably not match one of the standard screens precisely. On X the standard resolutions are 75 and 100dpi, on MS Windows 96 and 120dpi, and on the Mac 72dpi. This dialog provides the conversion between pixel size and point sizes at these resolutions.
Normally the new characters are created by rasterizing the outline font. If your system has the freetype2 library installed (and you checked the "Use FreeType" box) then PfaEdit will use the FreeType rasterizer to generate bitmaps, otherwise it will use PfaEdit's built-in rasterizer (which isn't as good, but involves a little less overhead).
Finally, if you have no outline font then the new characters will be created by scaling the (bitmap) font displayed in the font view.
In CID keyed fonts there will not be a set of bitmaps for each sub font, instead the entire complex of sub-fonts share bitmaps.
If the shift key is not depressed when selecting the menu item this will only build accented letters, if the shift key is depressed it will build general composite characters (fractions, ligatures, digits inside parens, roman numerals, etc.) as well. If invoked by short-cut (Ctl-Shft-A) or mnemonic it will only build accented letters.
If the current character is an accented character (and all the base characters
and accents have already been created) then this command will delete anything
that is currently in the foreground and put a reference to the base character
and another reference to the accent character into the foreground. So if
the current character were "À" then a reference to "A" would be added
to it, and a reference to "`" would be centered above the "A".
If Copy From is set to All Fonts then any
bitmaps will have a similar process done (even in the outline character
view).
A more complete description is given in the section on
accented characters.