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I'm designing a font intended to be used mainly as a subtitle font. It's a sans-serif font not unlike Helvetica.

The em size is 2000 (I know it "should" be 2048 for a truetype font), the ascent/descent are 1600/400. Most glyphs don't go higher than 1450 though, with the exception of accented Latin characters.

There lies the issue: when my font includes accented Latin characters, the tracking (line -of-text intradistance, but correct me if I got the term "tracking" wrong) skyrockets. I can't seem to find a way to control that.

As my intended design goes, I don't mind if I have a descender (e.g. "g") above and an accented capital Latin letter below and they almost touch. It's something that does not happen very often, anyway.

How can I control tracking? It seems it's auto-calculated.

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    The distance between lines is leading. The distance between letters is tracking.
    – smparkes
    Apr 19, 2011 at 23:37

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After a lot of search, I found the answer lies in the OS/2 tables, in the Metrics tab. I understand that there were many involved in specifying Truetype, so all details are scattered in a font file.

I will leave the question unanswered for a while, in case someone supplies pointers to more complete information.

Actually, the minimum/maximum heights defined in the font determine the font tracking, and the OS/2 tables can be used to increase that, never to decrease it.

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  • I wish I could understand your answer. What I need to change in os/2 to extend tracking?
    – Narek
    May 21, 2014 at 0:02

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