My reason for including the STAFF character, the intended effect of which I can now produce using U+2502 or U+2503, was that, being fairly new to producing fonts and just, thus far, using the Softy editor to produce ordinary TrueType fonts, I had noticed, when trying it out in 2002, that if I produce a font with a b c d e f then the font displays with lines packed togather, yet that if I then add g the line spacing for all lines increases, even if there is no g in that line. So I reasoned that the system might scan through a font when it is loaded and decide upon the lowest point for the whole font and then proceed on that basis.
Linespacing in typical Windows apps is controlled by OS/2 table vertical metrics WinAscent and WinDescent. My guess, from your description, is that Softy automatically prevents clipping by assigning OS/2 table values based on the max height of the font bounding box (the height from the lowest descent to the heighest ascent). Is there no way to manually set OS/2 values in Softy? If not, you should get yourself a proper font tool. FontLab is best, but Font Creator from High Logic is a pretty good and much cheaper option.
I think this is getting off topic for this list.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED]
It is necessary that by all means and cunning, the cursed owners of books should be persuaded to make them available to us, either by argument or by force. - Michael Apostolis, 1467
