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I'm in the middle of picking a font for a rather sizeable project, and we've largely landed on Migrena Grotesque. Unfortunately, the alignment of this font seems to be a lot lower, and the general size is a lot smaller than usual. For vertical centering, I have to manually nudge it up a few bits to get it visually centered, and I have to use it at 18pt for it to visually look the same size as most other fonts at 16pt.

Is there a (hopefully quick) way to fix things like this in the font file itself? Software wise, I have Glyphs 2.

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  • Note that at least some typesetting softwares allow you to fine tune the scaling of different employed fonts, which is what I strongly would prefer in this situation.
    – Wrzlprmft ♦
    Jun 13, 2017 at 13:09
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    You don't say what software you are using, but I would suspect that defining font styles that incorporate your desired layout tweaks would be a better route than doctoring the actual font file.
    – Westside
    Jun 13, 2017 at 13:09
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    If using InDesign you can shift the baseline via paragraph styles.
    – Lucian
    Jun 13, 2017 at 13:12
  • I noticed these problems in InDesign, Sketch and as a webfont. The font will then need to be updated on a four-digit number of older designs. It's definitely a path of least resistance to edit the font file itself to fix these technical issues, than adjust the size and position of all text boxes going forward.
    – Emphram Stavanger
    Jun 13, 2017 at 13:30
  • Just my tuppence worth, but I'd find another font before I'd mess around like that. There's not exactly a shortage!
    – mayersdesign
    Jun 13, 2017 at 19:22

2 Answers 2

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Some fonts just aren't constructed very well.

Or the foundry tends to stick with their standards as opposed to comparing things to other foundries work. I would suspect in this instance this may be the case. The foundry has a few typefaces. So, I'd guess that they all suffer from the same slight variances when compared to type from other foundries. I love small, independent, foundries and try to support them whenever possible. However, what you are describing is my largest "pain point" with using their products.

In these instances all you can really do is deal with the inconsistencies (as you've described), choose another font, or dive in and actually edit the font files directly.

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  • I suspected as much. I have no problem diving in and actually editing the font files directly, as manually dealing with these quirks is way too much effort considering the scope of the project. Someone told me I'd need to go through every letterform and adjust manually, but since I just want to uniformly scale and nudge the font up, I can't help but think that this would/should be just a general level setting or an automatic script.
    – Emphram Stavanger
    Jun 13, 2017 at 19:08
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A little late to the party I am, but here is my opinion:

Font Forge has the option to massively transform the glyphs in the font file, i.e., effect move, scale, rotation, etc. Also, as far as I understand, it also includes modifying appropriately the metrics for the font.

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