Antialiasing

[David Webber]

I have just created a new font, added lots of glyphs, exported and installed the .ttf file.

Testing it in Word 2007 and Notepad (on Win 7), it appears that there is no antialiasing (though other fonts are working fine).

screen image of my font and others

fonts.png (18.52 KiB) Viewed 4003 times

In the 'smoothing' window I have

Limit:65535
Standard:Gray
ClearType:Smooth

Any ideas about what I have done wrong or forgotten to do?

[I checked other threads, but didn't find the answer.]

I don't know if it is relevant but my em-square is 2048 units and WinAscent=2732 WinDescent=-815.

Dave

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Which version of FontCreator are you using? There's an option for Greyscale smoothing in earlier version, but hinting was new to FontCreator 7.

Smoothing Overview for FC6.5

Hinting for FC7.5

[David Webber]

Thanks. I'm using v7. I'll read up on hinting.

Dave

[David Webber]

In the smoothing dialogue box, I see one can specify different 'ranges' each with an upper 'limit'.

To what quantity does the limit refer? Is it some measure of the height of the font in pixels?

Dave

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

In the smoothing dialogue box, I see one can specify different 'ranges' each with an upper 'limit'.

To what quantity does the limit refer? Is it some measure of the height of the font in pixels?

Dave

Yes, I think it is in pixels.

[David Webber]

Thanks for the help! I think I'm sliding up and down a learning curve here

I've tried antialiasing and hinting, and I'm getting some weird results. (And BTW the Font Creator test window is incredibly useful!)

At 10point and 12point the font looks 'reasonable' on screen.

At 11 points some characters are awful. For example the top/bottom ofthe O is zero thickness as I showed it. The horizontal bar on the A is also zero thickness. Hinting and antialiasing don't help. So I'm going through the characters which have disappearing strokes, and thickening them up by a small amount. This is making a big improvement.

The reason this is particularly weird is the way I created these glyphs. I pinched them from a different font (one from Google which comes with explicit permission for creating edited versions) and then used the glyph transformer to scale them up by somewhere between a factor of 110% and 150% (should have written it down!) - for idiosyncratic reasons to do with them being inserted into my music symbols font. Now I'd have expected that scaling down might result in losing some thin strokes, but not scaling up.

However, I have just realised that the source font has an em-square of 1000 and mine has an em-square of 2048. So the em-square has scaled by a factor of 204.8%. So maybe only having scaled the characters by less than this has resulted in thin strokes getting lost.

But editing the points on individual glyphs seems to be the answer. Some of the glyphs have very economical numbers of actual points, with control points being used to create long smoth curves. Maybe more actual points on the curve will help, but I guess I'll have to experiment.

Dave