making-fonts-proza-libre

Mike Duggan
Mike Duggan Posts: 239
in Technique and Theory
http://ilovetypography.com/2016/07/14/making-fonts-proza-libre/

such as awesome article

Comments

  • Jasper de Waard
    Jasper de Waard Posts: 639
    Wow! Thanks, Mike :)
  • Mike Duggan
    Mike Duggan Posts: 239
    the hinted results are great. I love hear about this kind of attention to detail. its another step in the design process, and well worthwhile for any font intended for reading online
  • Jasper de Waard
    Jasper de Waard Posts: 639
    I intend on trying your VTT auto-hinter with manual adjustments for my next typeface. Will let you know what I think :)
  • Mike Duggan
    Mike Duggan Posts: 239
    that's great to hear. The RES hints may help to ease the break in hairline from one to two pixels. but you may have intended that in Proza. ttfautohint also has an option that rounds to fractional pixels for the y features. I am not sure if you meant to set it or not.
  • Mike Duggan
    Mike Duggan Posts: 239
    actually in your case the hinting was not an extra step, you had this in mind all along, which is even more impressive
  • Jasper de Waard
    Jasper de Waard Posts: 639
    Yes, I used the 'fractional' option in ttfautohint as well.
  • Hin-Tak Leung
    Hin-Tak Leung Posts: 361
    I didn't want to post until I have done the mac os x binary, but I 'd be interested if ttfautohint'ed fonts passed the rasterisation test in font validator 2.0 or not.

    If you have a windows computer, or brave enough to use wine on Mac/linux - just grab either 2.0.0-bin-net2 or 2.0.0-bin-net4 from https://sourceforge.net/projects/hp-pxl-jetready/files/Microsoft Font Validator/
  • Mike Duggan
    Mike Duggan Posts: 239
    hi Hin-Tak Leung, you might want to start a different thread for this topic?
  • Mike Duggan
    Mike Duggan Posts: 239
    ahh ok, I think I was looking at an older version of the fonts. I see in the latest version the fractional rounding. Its a pity the ILT, didn't use your font as the body text in the article. Again, bravo, this made my week :)
  • Hin-Tak Leung
    Hin-Tak Leung Posts: 361

    @Mike Duggan : Your colleague

    @Jason Campbell raise an interesting point : is it better or worse to use a hinting tool ttfautohint (based on FreeType), to hint for fonts targeting another rendering engine (Microsoft's), or using MS VTT to build libre fonts targeting platforms where Freetype is used for rendering; or should one always use the same tool set for the platform concerned. i.e. MS VTT for fonts used on MS platforms, ttfautohint for non-MS ones.

    That was the question he was asking: can one use a hint-checking tool built around one engine to check hinting errors from tools targeting another. One might argue it is better: no secret knowledge working around each others' bugs.


  • Hin-Tak Leung
    Hin-Tak Leung Posts: 361
    edited July 2016
    So I am interested in whether there is any secret by-passes and overlooks between ttfautohint and the new rasterization test in Font Validator 2.0 (both based on Freetype).  
  • Mike Duggan
    Mike Duggan Posts: 239
    I think if you want to ask questions about this, you should start a new thread. thanks. Mike
  • Belleve Invis
    Belleve Invis Posts: 269
    edited July 2016
    @Hin-Tak Leung I think maybe you can try to compare bitmaps to find out the detailed difference between rasterizers, or maybe write some special fonts to "stress test" them. (Pomax on Github has made some special CFF OTFs that contain unusual opcodes which crash many font editors and rasterizers. What may be a good sample for you.)
  • Mike Duggan
    Mike Duggan Posts: 239
    Belleve Invis ; Hin-Tak Leung  can you please either start a new thread or stop comment ing on this one. thank you.

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