The Design Grid

The design grid is a configurable lattice for constructing and aligning a drawing. You choose its spacing, appearance, and slant. It can provide a modular reference—for example, a repeated ten-unit interval—without changing the font's units per em.

It is separate from the font unit grid, which displays individual integer-coordinate intervals at high zoom. Round coordinates separately controls fractional editing.

Show and configure the grid

Choose View > Measurements > Grid, or use the Toolbar's Grid button. Work with a drawing tool: Text mode does not display the design grid, and spacing modes can have different view settings.

Open Preferences > Grid, Guides and Hints to set horizontal and vertical grid distances. They are measured in font units and need not be equal. Set the line and dot appearance so the lattice is visible without obscuring the contours.

Grid distance and slant define the reference lattice; the rounding checkbox controls how edits meet it. Appearance settings below govern visibility, not the font’s UPM.

The Grid values on Font Info > Font Dimensions can provide per-master distances; see Layers and Masters. If a preference change does not produce the expected spacing, check those values in the active master. A zero override falls back to the corresponding preference.

Transparent lines and dots can hide the lattice while retaining snapping; turning off grid display is a different operation.

Snap to the design grid

For ordinary grid snapping, enable both View > Measurements > Grid and View > Snap > Grid. Then move a node near a grid position and inspect the snap indication and resulting coordinates.

Round nodes, guides and anchors to grid points in Grid preferences controls the strength of the constraint:

• With it off, snapping attracts the object when an eligible grid position is within the snap distance.
• With it on, eligible positions are rounded to the nearest grid point during the operation, rather than only near a grid line.

Ten-unit grid intervals differ from the one-unit precision of integer editing.

Off-curve handles and TT control points are not independently forced onto the design grid like on-curve nodes. A handle can follow its parent node without being independently rounded to an intersection.

To align existing content, select the intended nodes and choose Contour > Align Points > To Grid, introduced in Basic Node and Handle Operations. The current grid and rounding/snap choices affect the result. Check curved sections afterward: moving the nodes can change the silhouette even when their attached handles move with them. Use an explicit selection instead of relying on the command's broader no-selection scope.

Slanted grid

Grid preferences can use an explicit Slant angle or follow the master’s italic angle. The View > Italic Angle modes and their metric implications are taught in Preparing for Italics; choose the mode that applies the font angle to the grid. This changes the reference, not the outlines.

Check the resulting coordinates

After using the grid, inspect a few node coordinates and the filled glyph. A modular grid can make repeated construction consistent, but a curve may need an optical adjustment between grid positions. Temporarily suspend snapping for that edit, or change the grid choice deliberately.

Keep the distinction clear: grid visibility changes what you see, snapping changes where an edit lands, and coordinate rounding changes the precision the font retains.