Minor Truetype Font Editing on a Mac
(also: how to fix Consolas' baseline)
Update December 5, 2011: Changed download link to the most recent version of Apple Font Tool suite, which is now x86 compatible.
With the release of Windows Vista, Microsoft included six new fonts that they commissioned for the occasion. They are the new defaults for Vista and Office. They’ve also made them available for Mac through Office as well as a handful of free (as in beer) utilities. I got them by following these instructions.
These new modern fonts are explicitly designed for display on computer screens with ClearType. Although Apple has a different philosophy on font rendering, the same basic premise is used in OS X. Besides all that (or, rather, because of it) these fonts are very pretty.
But there’s a problem, and you can see it in the image above. When packaging these fonts up for the Mac, Microsoft goofed on the baseline for Consolas. The icon previews below show it much more obviously.
In short: it’s annoying. And wrong. And the fix is after the break.
Continue Reading…Posted by Matt on Mar 15, 2009