Mysterious Changing Font

I’ve been going crazy trying to keep the font sizes consistant and it almost seems like a bug. The problem is, when I change the size of the font, the glyphs change their sizes and shape slightly. For example, if you wrote the word “test”, on 10 point the “e” will be bigger then the “s” and the “t” will look bold, but if you got to 12 point the “s” will be bigger then the “t”, but if you go to 14 point, it looks normal and just the way it should.

I’ve double-checked the glyphs to make sure they lined up correctly and I’ve everything I’ve seen related to font problems on this forum, but no one has mentioned having a problem like this. Please help, this one is very frustrating.

I’m using the eval version 5.0, could that be the problem?

It is due to lack of hinting information, which Font Creator doesn’t support.

Try adding Greyscale tables, and enable font-smoothing in Windows.

I did add this at first, but didn’t seem to do anything, I currently have the greyscale rendering set to 11.

Did you start from scratch or did you use another font?

You might find the following threads interesting.

They each mention my idea of mathematical pseudo-hinting.

http://forum.high-logic.com:9080/t/loss-of-clarity-of-fonts/850/1

http://forum.high-logic.com:9080/t/spacing-problem-for-symbol-font/918/1

http://forum.high-logic.com:9080/t/fonts-in-development/820/1

Maybe you would like to try the mathematical pseudo-hinting idea in your font or maybe not: however, reading about it may provide you with a clearer idea of what is happening when a font is being rendered on screen when the font does not have hinting. My mathematical pseudo-hinting does not use conventional hinting at all, it is just a matter of trying to design an ordinary unhinted font so as to help the rendering system get the right idea as to what is wanted!

Have you tried printing the fonts as hardcopy? As many printers have better resolution than many screen displays, sometimes a font can look much better in hardcopy than it does on screen.

I hope that this helps.

William Overington

I did base it off another font, for instance to know what glyphs would be needed, but all the glyphs were changed completely, 100%. I used photoshop to create the individual glyphs, imported them in and sized them accordingly.

Do you think there are embedded settings messing things up?

I printed out the font on a printer and it looks fine. I’ll read up on your mathmatical hinting.

You could try to remove all hinting and then add grayscale support.

  • To remove hinting go to Format->Tables and select “Remove Hinting”.
  • To enable grayscale, select Grayscale from the Format menu. Delete all entries. Now add a new entry and set “Grayscale rendering”.

You could also use Visual TrueType (VTT) from Microsoft to add hinting to your fonts. This is not an easy task. VTT It is free and can be downloaded from here:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/DevToolsOverview.mspx

Thanks! I’ll try that and transfer the glyphs to a new sheet and start from scratch with the settings. Thanks for all the help, I’ll let you know what the final outcome is!

MAN! Has anyone actually gone through that nearly “dark ages” aquisition method for VTT?