shadow dots and thickness repeated on some letters

[Anne Hext]

Hello Again,

I notice that in word excel the capital P in my font has a small dot under the curved bowl bit. Its always in the same place and it does not do it in arial. so I checked the P for an unusual Bezier curve or a stray extra point hidden way but it looks clean and straight forward. One point on the curve at the apex and a point off the curve each side. The number 4 is also suffering with a line that sort of shadows or goes thick under the triangle shaped bit of the 4 in a similar position in fact.
Any ideas anyone
Anne

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

A screen shot or the font project might help.

[Anne Hext]

ok
i HAVE ADDED IT TO THE ORIGINAL MESSAGE
aNNE

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

I cannot see any problem, but I don't have Excel to test it in.

I see that in Export Settings you have opted to keep the original hinting. Try changing that to Autohinting and see if that makes any difference. As you said, there is nothing obviously wrong with the glyph outlines.

One tip on designing the glyphs: Letters with a flat bottom like E, I, L, should sit on the baseline, but glyphs with rounded bottoms should overshoot it by 10-15 funits so that the glyphs align visually at small sizes.

[Anne Hext]

Hello Bhikkhu
Yes auto hinting seemed to have sorted it out on both the 4 and the P.
Thanks for the tip about curved letter bottoms. It is a dyslexia font so I don't want it to be too much of a straight line so maybe I will do 10 funits above and below for the curves and see what that does.
Anne