Units/Division of the grid in a serif font.

Rodrigo Saiani
Rodrigo Saiani Posts: 78
edited December 2014 in Technique and Theory
I'm designing a display serif font in Glyphs with pretty organic shapes and sometimes the round numbers create an annoying dent in places where I need a point off the fully horizontal/vertical axis.

Is it a no-no to use a larger subdivision of the grid (from 1 to 10 or 100 depending on the detail), and not round it on export?
Should I expect huge problems in rendering?
Does anyone design fonts with subdivision units different than 1 to make it more accurate?

Thanks for the help!
Tagged:

Comments

  • Jacques Le Bailly
    Jacques Le Bailly Posts: 95
    When exporting a font to open type or true type, values will be rounded to fit the grid. If you want more accuracy, you can use more units per Em. True Types often have 2048 units per Em. This would also work in Postscript (CFF).
  • Georg Seifert
    Georg Seifert Posts: 677
    Values don't need to be rounded to the grid on export.

    But to try to answer the original question. I would draw on a regular 1/1 grid and re to avoid the bumps by changing the position of the diagonal nodes. Put the path in the background and then move the oncurve node a bit up an to the right and ajust the handles until it fits the original shape. This is a bit tedious but it is possible to minimize the bump.

Categories