hinting 101

Ante Sikirica
Ante Sikirica Posts: 3
in Technique and Theory
Hi all.

So I made a font, I put a lot of effort in it, looks good to me (printed).

But on screen it sucks!!! (ta na-na-na ta na-na)

Never hinted anything, don't know where to start? Is there any script, or other program that could help me with this? (I use really old mac)

I watched some videos, read some tutorials, so I made it here to see what you guys think.

Please don't link me with Fontlab video courses, they are great, but audio is really bad.

One more question, there is tons of diacritics, how to know to witch language they belong, and if that language has more diacritics I didn't do, so I would have a full set. Is there a way to know how many (and their names) languages does your font support?

Thanks
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Comments

  • Bhikkhu Pesala
    Bhikkhu Pesala Posts: 210
    The Letters Database may be what you're looking for. 
  • Hin-Tak Leung
    Hin-Tak Leung Posts: 363
    Well, if you are on a mac (and old one at that) you are probably limited to ttfautohint. Otherwise you may use Microsoft's vtt . Or try to use vtt under wine. That will require an Intel mac. 
  • Mike Duggan
    Mike Duggan Posts: 239
    for VTT, I have written some blog posts on how to use the latest VTT with Autohinter


    https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/fontblog/
  • Ante Sikirica
    Ante Sikirica Posts: 3
    Thanks guys for fast reply, letters database is a lot of help, and I will check out ttfautohint and Microsoft VTT (probably gonna find some other computer to do it on :)) )

    Thanks again. A
  • Hin-Tak Leung
    Hin-Tak Leung Posts: 363
    Actually I am also interested in what you mean by "on screens it socks". Do you mean on windows or Mac ( since the latter is your dev platform).

    As for your last question, if your font comes with proper cmap tables, Microsoft Font Validator can cross-reference that with the OS/2 table and tell you about language codepage coverage - your fonts having glyphs for a particular language and did not declare support for it, or the opposite, declaring support for a language but have missed some glyphs. The current FontVal runs on Intel mac also.

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