strange letter shaping

[koalasushi]

Just created a font, in the program preview the font looks perfect. When I use it in a program such as Adobe InDesign or Illustrator, the lowercase "p" has a weird flat top to it. I checked that it was within the x-height and all registrations on the font are correct, yet it still causes the flat top... any suggestions?

[vanisaac]

A little test for you: increase the font size to about 48-60pt and see if the top is still flat. I'm guessing it won't be because I think you are running into a hinting artifact. What happens is your screen has much worse resolution than your printer, and the OS has only limited tools available to figure out how to approximate the shape of a letter when it is on screen. There are several options that can be set at the font level, and I think you have eliminated greyscaling - which makes the edges of your characters be in a shade of grey representing the fractional amount that the character covers the pixel, but tends to make your characters look fuzzy. Instead, it's an all or nothing - whether the outline covers the center of the pixel determines whether it is black or white. There is a super-complex set of instructions that FCP doesn't support (because of its complexity) called hinting, which allows you to mathematically specify how you want the character to look, which is why the professional system fonts always look better on screen, but no better on paper than yours. In the end, without hinting, and without greyscale rendering, at certain sizes, your p is going to look like its top got smooshed.

You can add greyscale rendering at menu Format:smoothing.

[vanisaac]

I was about to throw a guesstimate answer on here, but this answer seems to have everything on lock. I appreciate having you around van, you learn something new every day.

Thanks for the appreciation. I just try to troll the forum for questions that I can shed some light on. I've never been an artistic person, so my applicable interest in fonts is utilitarian, which means my expertise tends towards areas like rendering, OpenType, and Unicode. I'm just glad that others find edification from my posts as well.