I just saw noticed the release of
Source Serif Pro and wondered about how foundries make things look good on screen at text sizes. I assume you can only get this quality with hand-tuned Truetype hinting. I'm only used to working in Glyphs, which does PS autohints.
If I'm careful about my zones and metrics in Glyphs, what would be a good workflow to get manually-tuned webfonts?
Do I export a UFO and hint in some other standalone hinting program? Or do I generate OTFs, convert it through font squirrel, and use something to fine-tune the output? Perhaps Glyphs is just not the tool to start in for this kind of work?
A little confused on the process.
Comments
Most people I know export a .ttf and manually add TT-instructions in FontLab, VTT or use ttfAutohint.
Glyphs 2 does support webfont export directly (woff, woff2 and eot) and build in ttfAutohint. And I’m working on manual TT-intructions.
There Jeremy Horus is working on a TT hinting tool for Robofont:
If you're interested in learning how to TrueType hint, this might be the most useful place to start: http://luc.devroye.org/tt_hinting_tutorial.pdf
And I'm working on that. And I even try to make the hinting work on (cubic) multiple master files.
Just wonderin'.
I'm wholly ignorant on this topic as I only just got involved with hinting and web fonts.
I'm not trying to make a point for the idea that we no longer need to limit file sizes considering technology keeps advancing, but I wonder where we're at now. Like, what kind of things can you currently leave out of web fonts to save space? Will we be leaving the same things out in 5 or 10 years from now or will we start to re-implement a lot of features? What size do you feel is the current limit for practical web fonts and what's a common file size?
Speking of which I was wondering, can one generate high_level hinting e.g. in FontLab with ttfautohint? That would be great for the fine tuning process.
I suppose the standard ligatures should be kept, but mostly I added what I call automatic ligatures, where I design an alternate letter (like an /f with a shorter terminal) that is activated when placed in front of certain other letters. For this typeface I discarded the connected ligatures I did before as the disconnected ligatures are less obtrusive. Do you know if such functions can also be activated on the web? I did put it in the standard ligatures feature. If it doesn't work I can drop a few letters already. And what about numeral sets like tabular and oldstyle?
I'm not sure what you mean by high_level hinting in FontLab and I don't know if you can use it within FontLab. Once I've finished a typeface I save the fonts as both otf and ttf and just let ttfautohint do its work on the ttf fonts. I think it adds about 30kb to the file size but the difference is quite dramatic, particularly at smaller pt sizes.
Restricting the font to a particular subset of glyphs, pyftsubset does that.
> Do you know if such functions can also be activated on the web?
Via font-feature-settings, yes. Still have to use prefixed versions for all the browsers out there.
> I'm not sure what you mean by high_level hinting
Visual hinting as in Microsoft VTT, with arrows linking stems.
Just found the answer to my question: "Note that FLS cannot convert (decompile) the low-level TT hinting into the high-level TT hinting."
What exactly the graphics do is probably the subject of another thread, or maybe even a session at Crafting Type.
They link stems, vertical or horizontal. Basically you can create stem classes with a certain width associated (can be assigned across glyphs) so that they all render with the same stem width. There is also an interpolation command that specifies a point must be on the middle of two others.
The most comprehensive paper I've found on the subject is [this one](http://luc.devroye.org/tt_hinting_tutorial.pdf), starting from page three it explains the different instructions.