Here is the screenshot of the typeface I am working on. At 19px size and lower, lowercase start to "dance". Tops and bottoms are uneven, like they have a different baseline/x-height. I don't know what's the reason, because I can't recall such situations earlier. I defined the zones in a classic manner, and did PS autohinting (with manual hint adjustment in addition). Even tried to push extreme nodes in zones (thought it might be a coordinate rounding problem). I would appreciate much any input on this, thanks!
Comments
That makes it hard to give specific guidance. I concur with Malcolm that there might be something very wrong with your zones. (Then again, if you are viewing the font on macOS, your hinting would be irrelevant at these sizes.)
The other problem I have is that checkboxes don't work (nor in Font Info or Exporting Profiles). I wrote on FL forum earlier about that, but for some reason, just a few of us can reproduce that problem (it got official bug ID number)
I didn't know this problem about zones is a bug, otherwise, I would post on FL forum.
Thanks!
In the meantime, I realized that I actually can define zones and export the font with such defined zones, but if I save the project/close/open it again, zone definition is lost.
So here you can download the source project (without properly defined zones, because I can't save them as mentioned above), the screenshot how I intended to define zones as well exported OTF (with proper zones, but with the "dancing" lowercase):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/fsq3en9qfm3geho/Zoran Source Files.zip?dl=0
Thanks!
Don't know how good FL5 is in reverse engineering of PS hints, but it shows me this:
So, if we add top vertical zone, it looks good:
@Viktor Rubenko It works, many thanks! So the problem wasn't with the alignment zones but with glyph level PS hints.
The only thing is that now I am not sure I completely understand "glyph level PS hint" as a concept, but I will post that as a separate question, because I think it's an important topic that shouldn't be hidden in this thread.
Thank you all!
FontLab VI uses a higher level interface for setting alignment zones, which is shared by PS/CFF and TTF hinting models. When compiled to a PS/CFF font, the baseline alignment zone should get written to the top dictionary; this is a legacy of the initial Type 1 hinting implementation.