I am considering purchasing FontCreator to create custom symbols for use with ESRI’s ArcMap. During my research on this topic, I have seen comments about hinting being an issue for small point sizes and the fact that FontCreator does not fully support hinting, but the examples discussed involved letters. None of my symbols will be letters, per se, but may contain letters inside a graphic. I plan to make traffic control signs for traffic control plans which designate where to place detour signs and such around road construction zones. On paper, the signs will be about an inch square, with text sized accordingly. Other planned symbols include small graphics for traffic cameras.
My question is, when hinting is an issue with small point sizes, how small is “small”? And given that some of the sign symbols will have text inside them (“Detour Ahead” or “Road Closed Ahead”), how much of an issue is hinting likely to be in those cases?
It’s not just at small point sizes, it’s small point sizes with large dot size (dpi). If these are going to be printed on paper, the dpi of a printer (300+) is going to render any character large enough to read without a magnifying glass crystal clear, no problem. It’s really only screen resolutions where hinting makes much of a difference. That’s basically it. It sounds like your application has absolutely no use for hinting, as long as you can identify the symbols on screen when you type it in. If you have trouble, you can always increase the font size momentarily just to check the individual signs before you print.
Just remember, hinting only kicks in when the computer is trying to squeeze a letter or symbol into a relatively small number of points. Screens often run into this problem. Printers, almost never.
Actually, screen viewing could be an issue. I was recently involved in an event planning committee, and we used ArcMap live in every meeting, projected onto a large screen, rather than a static PDF. I don’t know if it will happen again like that, as the event is still in the planning stages. For most of my uses, no, it should not be much of an issue, but eventually, it could be.
Not really, no. There are utilities out there that will allow you to create and attach embedded bitmaps to the font. The only other option is to add hinting to the font. Neither of these can be done natively with FCP, although embedded bitmaps may be available in a future version. For now, it may be a bit troublesome. Projectors usually have pretty crappy screen resolution, so I would recommend avoiding this at all costs.
There is one other possibility, which is to find a regular roman font with hinting that includes permission to alter and use the typeface in a derived work. You could then make each of your symbols a composite character using the hinted base characters, and I think the hinting may transfer to the composite. I don’t know this for a fact, so someone else will have to speak to the technical feasability of this plan, or you can check in the documentation.