Eliminating some extrema in an ultra-light face with rounded terminals

Max Phillips

I'm finishing up (please God) a sans with rounded terminals (see attached image), and the ends of slanted strokes in the Thin weight are proving tricky. Specifically, it's hard to get a nice finish when you include extrema, and you get nodes clustered very tightly together, even at 2400upm, which makes me worry about bumps, especially if some app downsamples this letter to 1000upm. Would terrible things happen if I eliminated the extremum circled in red, and a few of its pals?

James Puckett

From a final QA standpoint points are only needed because some rasterizers use them to fit text to a grid. This isn’t text that’s going to be used on screen at small sizes, so you can just skip them.

Georg Seifert

I would move up the diagonal node above the extreme a bit.

William Berkson

In the PS Type 1 spec document they say that nodes at extrema are not needed for small features like serifs. My understanding has been that they were only needed to give hinting a hint. But in cases like this, particularly as the main stroke is diagonal, they are not needed. I'd be interested in what those with knowledge on hinting and rasterizers think of this question.

Chris Lozos

This is not a small feature case. The difficulty, particularly with sloped letters, is when two points are close together, there is not enough room for the handles to be placed at a proper angle. That is why Goerg is correct in saying to move the upper point further along the straight path and stretch the handle to fit the curve. This also helps alleviate the bone effect.

Max Phillips

Thanks, everyone. This is really helpful. Sounds like I can simply kill the extremum if I need to. But I might try giving it more elbow room, as Georg suggests.

Or simply add a point after the fact.

Frode, could you explain what you mean by this?

Max Phillips

Thanks, Frode.

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