I'm printing out specimens to test font spacing. The font is OTF and autohinted using Glyphs, the specimens are assembled in SILE (which is Harfbuzz under the hood) and I'm printing them out with a FujiXerox
ApeosPort-V C4476, quite a decent laser printer. But the spacing is looking very different on the page and on the screen. I sort of don't know who to trust any more!
Here's a photo of the screen:
The l is nicely centered.
Here's a photo of the printout:
It looks to me like the "l" has shifted over to the left on printing and is no longer centered.
This is with an A4 printout of the specimen at 12pt. The effect is not as pronounced when the specimen is printed double size. (magnified to A3 size)
What's going on? Bad printer rasteriser? Bad hinting? Something else?
Comments
Make sure that you’ve set at least two good values for StemSnapV — one for lowercase straight stem and one for uppercase straight stem.
Also, Erwin’s suggestion is a good one, for frame of reference. No hinting is sometimes better than bad hinting. Spacing may tend to be more reliable, but you may find stems varying.
And this may be a long shot, but your point structures are set up correctly, yes? I’ve seen some instances where odd rendering of spacing in printouts at least appeared to correlate with missing extreme points on the verticals in question, though I haven’t investigated this in depth. (Not sure how that would work for that “l”, but maybe a question for the rounds/arches)
Back to "l" question, I also had similar problems in past and they were caused by lack of proper PS hinting.
Postscript is listed as “optional” for the printer you’re using. Before you do anything else make sure that you don’t need to install something extra to get Postscript support. You might be getting errors from a format conversion.
I have printed a waterfall sample of both autohinted and unhinted text, with the printer set to "normal" quality and "best" quality. Here's a photo (quite large, right click and open image in new tab for full resolution):
I now can't see a problem, which is either my eyes not being good enough, or something even more strange happening. I'm sure there was one before - wasn't there?
Uhhh … I was under the impression that Preview rasterized text and printed it as an image, rather than sending the text to the printer & having the printer-driver do that. Do you get different results when you print from Adobe Reader?
Ain’t font technology fun?! ;-)