Copy-pasting glyphs also retains hinting?

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jamadagni
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Copy-pasting glyphs also retains hinting?

Post by jamadagni »

Hello. I would like to know if I copy-paste a hinted glyph from one font to another or from one location to another within a font, will it retain any hints associated with the glyph or would they be lost?
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Re: Copy-pasting glyphs also retains hinting?

Post by Dick Pape »

be lost.
Bhikkhu Pesala
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Re: Copy-pasting glyphs also retains hinting?

Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

If you copy/paste a glyph within the same font to a new glyph in the glyph overview, the hinting will be retained. However, as soon as you modify it in any way apart from adjust the right side-bearing, the hinting will be lost — check the little H at the intersection of the rulers.

If you use composites, you can create new glyphs that retain the hinting of the composite glyph members, but scaling or rotation can have unpredictable results.
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jamadagni
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Re: Copy-pasting glyphs also retains hinting?

Post by jamadagni »

Bhikkhu Pesala wrote:If you copy/paste a glyph within the same font to a new glyph in the glyph overview, the hinting will be retained. However, as soon as you modify it in any way apart from adjust the right side-bearing, the hinting will be lost — check the little H at the intersection of the rulers.
Thanks for this tip about the H. I remember having read it in the manual but it didn't register. But would any modification other than changing the RSB, even changing the LSB, lose the hinting? I thought hinting is only lost when the number of nodes in a contour changed?
If you use composites, you can create new glyphs that retain the hinting of the composite glyph members, but scaling or rotation can have unpredictable results.
Thanks for this.

But could you clarify whether the copy-pasting would retain glyphs even across fonts? You replied only w.r.t the same font.
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Re: Copy-pasting glyphs also retains hinting?

Post by vanisaac »

jamadagni wrote:Thanks for this tip about the H. I remember having read it in the manual but it didn't register. But would any modification other than changing the RSB, even changing the LSB, lose the hinting? I thought hinting is only lost when the number of nodes in a contour changed?

But could you clarify whether the copy-pasting would retain glyphs even across fonts? You replied only w.r.t the same font.
ANY glyph outline change will cause hinting to be lost. The RSB change does not actually change the maths of hinting, so that is the one exception to a glyph change not removing hinting, while an LSB change will change the maths.

Hinting information is not only glyph-by-glyph, but includes whole-font specific programming that cannot simply be copied from one font to another. Since hinting is not actually supported in FCP, you cannot copy it from one font to another. I don't know this for a fact, but I believe that adding glyphs into the middle of the font will remove hinting information from each glyph after that point, as the hinting program references glyph indices, and FCP cannot update that information.
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Re: Copy-pasting glyphs also retains hinting?

Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

To see if hinting is removed from glyphs or not, observe what happens to the little H at the intersection of the rulers after any action is performed. If its still there, then hinting was not removed.
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Re: Copy-pasting glyphs also retains hinting?

Post by jamadagni »

Thanks everyone for your replies.
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