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Blunt joins, why?
Majority (I think) of the fonts have blunt joins in glyphs, made with two points instead of just one vertex. Why is that? Would it be ok in today's standards to produce a Opentype font with only (single vertex) sharp joins?
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18 Jun 2012 — 4:26am
"Ink trap" : ink trap.
It's to prevent the ink inside a sharp edge running in. As your image shows, the outside joints are regular (or rather, if the outside joints were blunt as well that would be by design only, not as a practical precaution).
18 Jun 2012 — 6:34am
Inside and outside, it can be a good idea to truncate very sharp angles to mitigate the exaggerated effect that results when users apply a stroke (I know, but it's not like we can stop them doing it).
18 Jun 2012 — 6:56am
Inktraps of course, but they're used in display fonts as well. This got me to suspect that there may be also other reasons.
Strokes - hmm, interesting point. But in my case I certainly wouldn't compromise the design of the contours for preventing stroke inconsistencies.
18 Jun 2012 — 7:37am
I’ve sometimes blunted outside very acute angles to avoid ugly on-screen rasterizing effects (where the displayed glyphs will display unwanted spurs, particularly at smaller sizes), although it’s seemed to me an inelegant solution to the problem.
David
18 Jun 2012 — 8:03am
It provides a more decisive letter shape.
A sharp point is unfinished, in the sense that its exact position is determined by the output device (or size), not the type designer, and this will happen differently depending on relative sharpness, whereas as a designer one wants a more consistent shape.
18 Jun 2012 — 12:16pm
From me, this comes from the old practice of leaving room for the router bit.
18 Jun 2012 — 4:57pm
For *extremely* sharp corners, under some rasterizers, sometimes very bad things would happen. Leastways, that's what I got taught at Adobe, and I remember seeing the effects a few times, though that was Long Ago.
19 Jun 2012 — 11:31pm
Thanks for all your comments!
8 Jul 2012 — 10:24pm
I love traps- they do so many things.
See also:
http://www.themicrofoundry.com/ss_trapping1.html
hhp
8 Jul 2012 — 10:28pm
where to set joining type of glyphs from U-joining to D-joining in fontlab
9 Jul 2012 — 7:35am
In the “Node Properties” panel.
Make this appear by first control-clicking (Mac) on a node, then on “Properties”, near the bottom of the resulting pop-up menu.
[Sorry, not what you meant…]