By accident, I think I found how you need to do ascenders. Ascenders, to me, are the letters in the alphabet that extend above other characters, such as the characters b,t,h etc. Here you see on the left side , The crowfeet were set for the average character (the letter a) and this worked well, until I tried to use Outline Template on the "b" in Softy, as you can see, when I tried, The b was cut at the green line I added to this graphic.

OK, So I thought a simple fix was to raise the crowfoot at the top to encompass the taller characters and I would be off getting the characters into Softy but then I found that raising this crowfoot threw off the size of the "a" that I had already entered into Softy and if you looked, The characters with distenders were not taken into consideration, So the first time I had to do a font with a desender, the glyphs that I had already entered into the font would now be useless since the sizing would be off.

Here you see what I believe is the right way to get your graphic set up so that you can enter them. All that is left to do is enter your character and then move the vertical set of crowfeet to bracket the next character until you have entered all your glyphs. Yes, I had to doctor these graphics. If you look at them you will notice that the letters are entirely to close and when you try to scan the character you have the problem of part of the other character being scanned too. Always make sure you have enough space between the characters so as not to affect the characters on all four sides.

Having answered this question of how one would handle ascenders, I have been asked another which has to do with spacing of wide characters, mind you, I said characters which means it is to be use in a font , not a dingbat as I hope I will be able to explain.