Hi folks. I am testing autohinting using Illustrator at small point size zoomed in as recommended. It seems to mostly produce good results but I can’t figure out why some glyphs, like the cap H seen here, don’t jibe:
Its cap height is off by (in this case) a pixel. But it’s a simple glyph with its top and bottom edges right on the baseline and cap height. Here’s the glyph, and below that the settings for the alignment and stems:
Is this just randomness of Adobe renderer? Or have I done something off here? I want to make sure I haven’t goofed in auto hinting before trying to figure out how to manually hint the glyphs that are goofy. (It also seems weird that some other glyphs have the nice hard edge at the cap height and others get the halftone there, they all hit the cap height exactly.)
I believe I have figured out that I just need to manually hint this stuff. The manual-hinting tutorial page talks about sans serif cap-I as an example of something that can’t be auto hinted well. This seems to apply to cap H and a huge set of my other glyphs in my all caps font. (Seems to explain why the tops of the I, J, K, and L and the bottom stem of the F are all soft edged in the image above.)
I’d be very curious to read a more in-depth tutorial about how to think about hinting a bunch of different examples of different kinds of glyphs, with a little more detail on exactly what the hints mean in terms of what information they provide to the renderer that the outline and auto hinting cannot provide.
