Font Size question in Corel

[Scott Shepherd]

I thought you were supposed to get smarter and wiser each new day, but apparently that's not the case when it comes to me :)

I kept getting specific dimensions sent to me by customers. They want a .500" high letter.

I just did some vinyl subcontracting and went to pick it up and it noticed it seemed small. Got back to the office, checked it out, sure enough, it's small.

A month ago or so, I had the brilliant idea to switch from point size to inches on the fonts. Brilliant, I thought, because now when I wanted 1" letters, I simply typed in 1", or so I assumed.

I checked my file, surely the letter said it was 1.500" tall. However, the vinyl cutter says it's just over 1.000" tall on his file. Hummm.....

So I just drew up some text, made the text 1.000" tall and measured the dimension using the dimensioning tool. A 1.000" letter "T" appears to measure .72" tall.

Huh? Okay, only thing I can figure is that the 1.000" means that if there were letters such as a lowecase "g" or a "y", then it would mean from the top of the upper case letters to bottom of the lowercase letters.

If that's how it works, then what's the best way to size letters to the specific size. For instance, if I had the word "DOGHOUSE", all capital letters, and I wanted them 1.000" tall. Is there an easy way?

Surely I'm a prime candidate for any medical trials on anything that stimulates brain activity.

Any insight?

[Mike Null]

Most likely this is the results of exporting to another program. I would try embedding the fonts with your Corel file. Also try sending it in a different format.

Part of your dilemma is possibly the result of the unseen white space that surrounds the fonts. That space is provided for automatic spacing.

If you'll convert your fonts to curves then you'll be able to see accurate dimensions. This is more noticeable in width than height.

[Scott Shepherd]

Thanks Mike, I thought it was the way I exported it. They needed it in .ai format, so I blamed that, in my head.

But just in Corel, forget the export, a 1.000" letter is far from being 1" tall. I come from an engineering/manufacturing world, when you make something 1.000" tall, it's 1.000" tall. Apparently in the graphics world, 1.000" tall means that it'll be 1.000" from the top of the tallest letter to the bottom of a lowercase letter that drops below the baseline of the text.

I'm so confused. All I wanted was a way to simply type in the dimension of a letter. Apparently that's something outside the spectrum for the graphics world? I asked the vinyl guy, and he said he draws a box the right height and scales it to fit the box.

Surely there's an easy way to make a 1" tall letter "T" without having to do that????

[Joe Pelonio]

My vinyl program, when set to 1" will make the height of a capital letter 1".

Any rounded capital letters like "O" will be a little over 1", say 1.063. It's very simple and easy, but the program was $8,000 back in '95. It is also a good design program so I'd rarely use Corel and import to it. When I do, I always convert to curves, and export as an ai. After getting it into my cutting program it's easy to resize a line of text.

In Corel if you type the lettering then conver to curves the height and width of the line is displayed. If thete are no descenders you can stretch to the size you want. If there are descenders, you'd have to ungroup, stretch and then click on the capital to verify the size, or, as your vinyl guy did, stretch to a box (or 2 guidelines 1" apart).

Corel (and other similar programs) were designed for the print world, not vinyl, so while they may be aware of it's use in vinyl work they have not specifically included that as a regular application.

[Dave Jones]

When you are creating artistic text in X3, besides the font and character size boxes, at the left end of the top are X/Y position and height/width of the object. After entering your text, the height shown there should give you the height of the text you entered. As you discovered, the character size box is setting the size of the font, which included descenders. But that height box on the left is showing the height of whatever you entered. It's not entirely accurate on width until you convert to curves, but should give a good reading for height either way.

If you are sending it out to somebody else though, I'd suggest converting to curves first anyway, since then there can't be any font conversion issues.

[Roy Brewer]

They want a .500" high letter.Scott,

This is the "quick fix" I suggest that will get you shockingly close on most fonts. Stay in points but move the decimal point two places.

If you want a .5" capital letter, it is 50 points. Again, this will be very close on most typestyles, but part of the problem is that the author of the font determines what portion of the "M" box he/she wants to use.

Try it and then temporarily move your text object up against the ruler to check it's height then undo back to where it belongs.

[James Stokes]

If I want 1/2 inch letters I pull down 2 guidelines space them 1/2 inch apart then scale my lettering to fit. One other thing I do sometimes is take my rectangle tool and make a rectangle 1/2 in tall and use that to guage with.

[Scott Shepherd]

Thanks for all the suggestions. I do some of them already. I find it amazing that you have to draw guidelines to determine the right height (it's what I have been doing in many cases). The graphic artist world is indeed it's own world, so I am slowly learning.

Roy, great tip, thanks, I'll give it a shot.

Dave, I'll have to give that a look at too.

Joe, I didn't have any problems giving them the file. I exported it as curves and they opened it and used it just fine. Only issue was my Corel size issue. I'm looking at the text dimension where it said 1.25" and he's telling me it's measuring 1.04". When I went back into Corel and looked at it, it was indeed 1.04" tall. So it was all on my end, nothing to do with exporting it for the vinyl guy. With what you guys have all said, I feel more edumacated :D

Thanks for the advice-

[Aaron Koehl]

Scott,

Draw a capital M or T.
CTRL+F8 (to switch to artistic text)
Type ".5 in" in the height field, (with proportional scaling enabled).

Notice the point size changing in the toolbar. This should give you the point size to use for the rest of your text to make your text .5" in tall, (assuming a mostly standard font), utilizing option #2 below.

1" letters can refer to three options:

1. All letters are uppercase, 1" tall, with no decending lines.
2. Just the capital letters are 1" tall, with decending lowercase possibly being more than 1".
3. The distance from the tallest capital to the lowest decending line is 1".

It will depend on the application.

If you want option #3, type your entire text, set height to 1". That way you're setting the height for the entire bounded object, and not just based on the capital character.