I’ve designed a font that does not display well when changing sizes. For instance, at 15 pts the capital “E” displays the top and bottom horizontal as thick and the middle as thin. At 14 pts the middle is thick and the top and bottom are thin. At 13 pts the bottom is thick while the middle and top are thin, etc. I have made sure that all the horizontals are the exact same thickness.
As an experiment, I opened up Arial to see where I might be going wrong. I found that if I move any of the points of its capital “E” by even one unit and move it back again, the letter will then have the same problem as my own character was displaying. As if the very act of editing the glyph was screwing something up. This also happens if I simply move the contour and move it back again. So what’s up?
I need a font that displays well without smoothing, so it’s important to get predictable scaling.
As you already suspected, the quality has a lot to do with hinting. The hints are what make a font look good at low resolutions. The Font Creator Program does not fully support hinting. The Font Creator Program is not aware of the actual hinting information; that’s why a glyph’s hinting information will be removed as soon as the outline is modified.
Note: glyphs with hinting data show an H in the upper left corner of the Glyph Edit window.
Hinting preserves the design characteristics of a typeface and it corrects font scaling defects, such as uneven stroke widths and curve asymmetries, usually by constraining the control point extrema of contour glyph shapes to the pixel grid before scan conversion.
Screen fonts are incredibly complex to make well. You have very few pixels to represent a very aesthetic and distinct design. That’s why at small sizes almost all typefaces look alike.
If you want to hint your font then you could use VTT to add hinting to your
fonts:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/creators.htm
Microsoft Visual TrueType (VTT) is a professional-level tool for graphically instructing TrueType and OpenType fonts.
Embedded bitmap data can be included in your fonts through Windows SBIT32.
You can download it here:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/tools/tools.htm?fname=%20&fsize=
I have never used these tools, so let me know your results.
I need a font that displays well without smoothing, so it’s important to get predictable scaling.
Although you don’t like font smoothing, it is the easiest way to improve displaying your fonts at small font sizes.
Potential other readers can try this inside the Font Creator Program in order to tell the operating system to activate font smoothing for all sizes:
Select “Format → Grayscale”. Delete all entries. Now add a new entry and set “Grayscale rendering”.