Does Onshape apply optical size adjustment when generating glyphs for sketch text?

neil_jackson795

In typography, there is a concept called 'optical size', whereby the shape of a glyph varies slightly as the glyph is shrunk or enlarged, in order to keep the glyph looking aesthetically good, and comfortably legible, at all sizes. The usual example of this is that the relative thickness of strokes (that is the thickness of the stroke relative to the size of the glyph) should increase a bit as the glyph is shrunk.[1]

Does OnShape apply any optical size adjustments to the glyphs in a sketchText entity[2]? In other words, suppose I create two sketchText entities, both containing the string "A", using the same font.  Then, I use sketch relations to cause one of my sketchText entities to be 0.1-inch tall, and the other to be 3-inches tall.  Will the shape of the "A" glyph in the 0.1-inch-tall sketchText be geometrically similar to the shape of the "A" glyph in the 3-inch-tall sketchText

-Neil

1. If you take the shape of a glyph that looks good when displayed as a 3-inch tall headline at the top of a newspaper page, and you scale that glyph shape down proportionally (i.e. without using optical size adjustments) to 0.1-inches tall (to use in the fine print at the bottom of the page, for instance), you find that the strokes in the 0.1-inch glyph look too thin - they seem wispy, insubstantial, and hard to read.
2. When I say "sketchText entity", I mean the sketch entity that is produced by the skText() function. (Which is what the 'Text' button in the sketch user interface produces).

paul_chastell

Onshape always uses the same 'size' of font from the font file and does no processing based on eventual size of the font. Text that is 1in tall and text that is 0.1in tall differ only in the scaling so that if you scale the 1in text by a factor of 0.1 it would be identical to the 0.1in text. Imagine a two phase algorithm that a) extracts geometry data from the font without caring what size it is in the sketch, b) scales/positions that data so that it fits with wherever the 'text box' ends up being after sketch solve.