Font sizes...

I looked around the site here but I couldn’t find anything about my exact problem. I’m also new to fonting.

I modified a couple of the characters in the Regular Arial font and everything worked well… until I started changing the font size. The characters I modified don’t match the unmodified characters on certain size settings. For example, when I go from font size 12 to size 13 on the “Test Font” screen, it appears that the characters I modified stay at size 12 instead of enlarging to size 13. When I go to size 14, then they once again match the size of the other characters. At size 15, my modified fonts appear to stay at size 14. At 16, they match up once again… and so forth and so on. The same is true when I do it in MS Word.

The only difference I can “see” is that the fonts I’ve modified have lost their “hinting”. Is there some fix for this problem?

Thanx in advance.

I believe the answers to your question can be found in the following threads:

http://forum.high-logic.com:9080/t/mysterious-changing-font/1063/1 Mysterious Changing Font

http://forum.high-logic.com:9080/t/hinting-gray-scaling-legibility/889/1 hinting gray scaling legibility

http://forum.high-logic.com:9080/t/hinting-of-both-flavours/751/1 Hinting of both ‘flavours’

http://forum.high-logic.com:9080/t/high-level-language-for-hinting/963/1 High Level Language for Hinting

Thanx Dave. So, basically, we can use the gray scaling to try to make it look better… but we cant actually get the modified characters to match the originals. Is that right?

The only case where hinting is retained is if you create a new composite character from two or more existing characters, e.g. you could create æ from a + e.

Grayscale rendering improves the appearance of fonts at smaller sizes (provided Windows font-smoothing is turned on), but it is not the same as hinting.

Since hinting is not used for printing, IMO the amount of work involved in adding good quality hinting to fonts is difficult to justify. I found that the auto-hinting added to my fonts is not very good, so I rely on greyscale rendering instead. You can preview the effect of different grayscales by scrolling the font size in the Font Test window.

If you’re adding glyphs to existing fonts then, of course, there is a marked difference between hinted and unhinted glyphs. When all of the glyphs are unhinted, but only use grayscale, the overall result is better.

Try changing the grayscale values to use only grayscale rendering up to about 21 pixels, and grid-fitting and grayscale rendering above that. This will give a more even appearance to the fonts at small sizes, though they will not be so sharp.

I would be interested to hear about the results obtained on high resolution screens. The dot pitch is no different to legacy CRT monitors, but I presume that they use more pixels to display 12 point text than lower resolution monitors. When I am editing documents, I tend to zoom in to nearly 200% (optimal width in Open Office on an A5 portrait page is 186%), so the effect of hinting is negligible.
Garava Regular.png

That is right. Only the glyphs you modify lose the hinting, so if you insist on only doing one or two, it is best to remove the hinting table so all glyphs are de-hinted. Please remember it is best to respect copyright laws.

“Grayscale rendering” can be manually done to images before importing them into glyph windows to minimize the number of points generated.