I am new to FontForge, but I have been using LaTeX and more recently XeTeX for many years now. I am trying to produce a new font with Font Forge and have not been able to get the glyphs aligned to the baseline. They are designed properly, but when I generate a .pdf file they are all aligned by where the bottom of the glyph is (so glyphs with descenders are pushed up by the height of the descender).
But here is the weird part (to me, anyway): I am trying to make glyphs that match an existing font, and when I include glyphs from that font — which I used as a guide when designing these new glyphs — only the new glyphs with descenders are aligned correctly with the existing glyphs. So, in reality, either the glyphs without descenders are the truly misaligned ones or the entire font is "pushed down" by exactly the height of the descenders and the fact that the glyphs within the new font are not aligned to the baseline just happens to push the descender glyphs back up by the correct amount.
I even copied some of the existing glyphs into the new font to see what happened and they are too low as well. Here is an example. The "X" is an example of a glyph that is now in both fonts. All the other glyphs are new.
I am creating an .otf. I went through the old font and copied every setting into the new one and did the same with enough different glyphs with and without descenders to see if this was something that needed to be changed on a glyph-to-glyph basis. Obviously, I am displaying these characters in LaTeX math mode at present (maybe that makes a difference, but I have copied relevant TeX information between the old and new font as well). I admit that I am stumped. I cannot understand why the old font works and the new one doesn't when I am pretty sure that all of the various settings are now identical. And I thought learning to work with splines was going to be the hard part :-). Thanks in advance for pointing me in the right direction.
I should also mention that I am using the Windows version of FontForge. That may be important because a lot of the FontForge documentation that I have found online while searching for an answer to this problem involves menu options and dialog boxes that I cannot find. So either the documentation is old or it is relevant to the Linux version and inapplicable to the Windows version.
