Hi everyone,

I'm having some issues with a truetype web font conversion on FontSquirrel. The resulting truetype hints look as good as they can on Windows, but at 13 pt and 18pt only, the overshoots on rounded glyphs render strangely. I haven't found a solution for this yet, but I'm hoping someone might be able to help me get to the bottom of this.

Is it possible that the truetype hinting instructions are affecting rendering on OSX? I've read that hints are mostly ignored by this operating system in favor of something more built in, so I'm a little confused.

Are there certain tests I should run, or is there more information that would be helpful in understanding the issue?

Image below:

Hi there,

I’ve experience a quite fuzzy thing: Exporting a font two times from FontLab, no known changes in the output settings.
The 1. font is the red text below, the 2. is the white text.
The only thing that was changed in between the 2. font-exports was the numbers (0 – 9) and the punctuation (,.;!?“”…) not displayed here.

It appears to be that now the Bitmaps are not the same anymore (especially the horizontal stems in a, e, s and h in the attached 300% example).
Anti-aliasing method is set to sharp in Photoshop, but this it seems has nothing to do with the different jittering in the result.

Any help or hint is highly appreciated!

I'm cant find a solution to this little problem:

If you look closely, will see that at 14 and 16pts there seems to be grayscale pixels under the /n serifs. How can I remove it, so it looks like the ones at 15, 17 and 18pts? (Firefox/Mac)

The blue lines are already in place, like this:

However, the problem remains.
I spend all day experimenting, hinting, un-hinting, tweaking blue values, looking at pixels, etc... and wasn't able to find a solution. Nothing seems to make any difference.

The greyscale pixels below the /o are OK, but not the ones below the /n, /i, /l, etc...

Hello all,

In light of yesterday's unveiling of its Macbook Pro (with Retina Display), seems like good time to restart this question:
What do you see as the future of TrueType hinting? The short-term value is obvious. I get it. I'm with you.
But when breaking out the checkbook, how do we measure the value of hinting in the context of improving rasterizers, iOS's limited appetite for hinting, screen resolution, etc.?

This is an honest question, not a statement. It's a wonderful, daunting, inspiring, confusing time of possibilities and pitfalls.
Love to read some thoughts on this, in light of Apple's news. Many thanks.

Thanks to David Berlow for leaving the Vineyard long enough to enlighten and entertain us at the NYC TDC. The day flew by, we came we saw, we got some hints about web type. And a good time was had by all. Special thanks to Carol Wahler for running a smoothe sailing event, and to Nick Sherman for doing all that keeky stuff!

I have recently purchased Quadraat Sans for use on a website and noticed it has some buggy hinting in Cyrillic glyphs at 17 px size. And I am just not going to use a different size.
That is, horizontal stems of letters "э", "з", "є", "н" are pixel lower than they should be — a really crucial detail in a Cyrillic font. And it ruins this font.

So I want to correct TrueType hinting of those letters. I know it's kinda illegal to do that, but that's not stealing a font or making a copycat and selling it. Just want to fix the bugs.

I have never dealt with hinting. So I had googled a lot, found some tutorials, but most of them are soo difficult to understand. TrueType hinting seems to be a mysterious process even for some of the authors of those tutorials.

I have taken a TrueType font with a free license, DejaVu Sans. Then created a new empty glyph, and copy-paste one of its glyphs to the empty one.

However, I saw that the hinting for the two is not exactly the same. When viewing the two glyphs in a word processor, I saw a difference between the two. So how can I make an exact copy of a glyph? Should I also duplicate some information inside the font’s table? Any simpler solution?

With the high res screens coming closer, (http://www.macrumors.com/2011/05/12/samsung-2560x1600-tablet-lcd-paves-w...), I was wondering if hinting will still be necessary if fonts are rendered with the same quality as a magazine or a book on screen.

Fonts being vector based, even zooming in won't impair any quality, so I'm not really sure if hinting will be necessary when all computers and portable devices are built with high res screens.

Also, if hinting isn't necessary, will the font file be significantly lighter, allowing webfonts to include more otf features like ligatures?

Thanks for your inputs on this :)

So a couple of years ago, I made my first font, Yagi Double. Then I wanted to hint it, got scared when I saw the amount of work involved. Now I'm ready to try again but it STILL seems too tedious, like I'm missing something. What I've read so far on the subject:
http://www.rastertragedy.com/
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=NotesOn...

As I understand it, you come up with an array of numbers representing the location of stuff like the baseline, cap height, x-height, etc. You feed these into two different areas in Fontlab. With an inline font like this, there are twice as many of these numbers. It's a lot of hassle.

1. Does this really produce good hinting results at the end, if I could force myself to do it properly?

Firstly, let me preface the post by saying that I am a complete newbie at everything pertaining to fonts, type, css or design, so please, be gentle.

The story thus far is as follows:

I'm designing a web page for a few friends (and myself), so that we have something (anything) online until our organisation has the funding to get a better page up and running. Luckily, I'm not doing the coding, a friend of mine is.

Does iPad make any use of font hinting, if available, please? I mean not just safari browser, but the device itself, e.g. in purchased apps.

As far as I know, the CoreText rendering engine on Mac OS X completely ignores font hinting and rather employs subpixel antialiasing (source: http://www.typotheque.com/articles/hinting).

However, iOS devices do not use subpixel antialiasing (probably due to portrait/landscape orientation switching) and do only standard "grayscale" antialiasing, which obviously leads to less precise results. So I am wondering whether or not do they make any use of font hinting (to compensate this)?

I'm trying to optimize my font for small, set sizes on-screen (9pt, 11pt, 13pt) specifically for osx. i don't know very much about font-exporting and the rasterization process, but i'm told that i font-hinting doesn't work on osx because quartz doesn't listen to the hints. is there any other method of optimizing fonts for small sizes on macs? the only other solution i can think of is to make separate font files for each size… and that just seems downright sloppy.

sorry this is a bit of a novice question, but my usual solution of scouring the internet for an answer hasn't been pointing me in any helpful directions.

thanks in advance!

I am having an issue with a font in development, and it is this: The vertical stems are too irregular in width/colour/weight when they are rendered in webbrowsers like Safari or Firefox in OS X. Firefox is marginally better than Safari. A PDF has the same issue, but to a lesser degree. All the stems in question are of exactly the same width. Other fonts like Ariel or other webfonts do not show this issue. I tried both CFF/OTF and TTF, but they both have the same issue. This leads me to think there is some hinting setting I have borked, but OS X does not use hinting, so huh? What can be wrong? I'm working with a UPM of 2048, but I seem to remember making a test in 1000, and that had the same issue.

I'll be grateful for any pointers, hints, puns.

Hi, wondering if anyone can assist:

I'm currently hinting a sans-serif family, and in the italics I tend to remove almost all the vertical stems. What's the general rule here? Is there any reason why I should NOT do this?

Hello people

In that time I told you I had a problem with the font family Titillium, that had still aliasing and pixellation, because of hinting and rasterization absence, did you remember?

Then I was building the fonts at FontForge 2.0 from Ubuntu 10.10. When I finished one font. I installed it on Windows 7 and Ubuntu fonts folders. I opened the font for viewing it, but I got surprised and disappointed with that... because my font is still aliasing and pixelatted. I didn't find how I better and optimize the antialiasing, hinting and rasterization of the fonts at FontForge and, other fonts editores... I couldn't try to correct the deffects of the letters and better the high quality.

Hi, can anyone point me to some online resources that will help me with hinting? I want to know the specifics of the process for FontLab 5, since the Fontlab manual is not especially helpful to me. In particular, I want to know if–when generating PS flavoured OT fonts–there's anything I can do to adjust the hinting on individual glyphs. But I am also interested in the process of hinting for TT flavoured OT fonts

I already know the basics, I am just finding it difficult to take the step with hinting towards a more professional approach than the Auto-settings in FontLab.

Thanks for any help you can offer.

Wayne, ATF.com.au

Hi!

I'm trying to gauge the importance of various collaboration scenarios... I hope you can spare a moment to consider the following scenario, and let me know your thoughts :-)

You publish a typeface family, "Alice," with 12 weights of roman and italic, covering full Latin, Cyrillic and Greek, under a 'libre' license. You publish all source files - FontLab VFBs including interpolation master outlines, OpenType feature files, and hinting files.

Is there any way in FLS to copy or duplicate hints from one .vfb to another?

I have a regular and italic weight and I'd like the hints to be the same on the italic minus vertical hints. It would be nice to not have to do it all manually.

(This is with Type 1 hinting)

A friend of mine, a professional font developer (15+ yrs of experience) is available for freelance and contract work assigments.

She can do manual TrueType instruction and PostScript hinting, font digitization, contours optimization, font building and rework, codepage transformations.

Resume and an overview of past projects are available at:
http://flavours.me/fontworks

Do you think she has a fair chance to build a small practice on this?

Hey everyone,
Been working hard on a few families as of late and before I was ready to generate and start testing I hit a "snag". It wasn't a snag really, just a question about hinting. Is it really important with the advances in screen technologies nowadays?

I've looked around online and even read a few manuals and all signs point to yes however most of these articles that give you tutorial advice on hinting haven't been updated since 1998. And I'm sure advances in screen resolution and type rendering have moved on since then.

So the question still remains... How important is hinting to typeface design and production now?

I developed some python script programs in FL.

the module is for TTF hinting and is like below.

1. auto-hinting in FL(differs from FL generating auto-Hinting)
2. copy & paste of FL hinting instructions(by searching similar pattern)
3. export FL hinting to VTT(except 'double link' instructions;;)
4. import VTT hinting to FL(convertable instructions only;;)

for Korean Hangul, module #1, #2 is very useful.
module #3, #4 is good for semi-autoHinted fonts for VTT.
especially #2 reduces working time by 50 ~ 70% of whole hinting work.(lots of Hangul designers agree with that.)
I think it is due to similarities of lots of consonants(elements) in hangul glyphs.
usually, hangul fonts have more than 2350(sometimes 11172) hangul glyphs.

Hi.

I've been studying optimal hinting techniques for correct screen display of typefaces. I've read tens or hundreds of pages of text about hinting, and I've taken quite a few stabs at googling it (the word "link" is a pretty useless search term on the internet).

Still I can't still quite grasp the difference between a hint and a link. Could someone here explain it to me?

Regards,
S.

Hi beautiful minds,

I have developed new fonts, using FontLab font editor; every thing was ok, when i write with the fonts using size less than 14, the characters look so bad; i know that i need some hinting justification.I am very blocked and this make me so nervous and stressed due to its hardness, I do really apreciate your help if you can send me some tutorials links or VTT ( it sounds that it is good hinting editor), or i can even send you the fonts for helping doing hinting process. my e-mail is :z_tito(at)hotmail(dot)com.

Many thanks

Hi Typophiles,

So, fonts on the web.

As many from this community have seen, when fonts are used in @font-face, they can come out looking quite different on the various browsers and operating systems. As part of the Type Rendering project (along with Tim of Nice Web Type, Ethan of Fonthead, and Zoltan), I want to figure this issue out. I want custom type on the web to succeed.

At this point we’re ready to pin down and illustrate the aspects that contribute to poor rendering quality. But I need this community’s help in one key part: We need to select appropriate typefaces to use as baselines.

We think we need three typefaces:
1) A CFF OTF font, designed for the web, with hinting.