As the title says.
I noticed that PS autohinting places the hints “inwards” as applicable. However, when exporting an OTF, and opening in Glyphs, all horizontal hints are upwards. Is this something I should worry about?
Here is an example. The top bar of the E is what I am referring to.
Hints in the binary are always upwards. For me it looks better when the hints start at the zone. It is how they are processed but not how they are stored.
What exactly does this mean? Can they only be upwards as per OT spec? Does Glyphs always write them upwards?
Processed where? Stored where? In the exported font?
The direction in Glyphs doesn’t matter; it will always be exported according to the OT spec (first bottom, then top).
If the hints always have a positive width in the OTF, what information is added by showing a negative width, or direction, in Glyphs at all?
Same for the blue dot and triangle/arrow. Is this because they might be automatically converted to TT instructions at some point?
It is partially a misunderstanding on my part a long time ago.
Will this be corrected – it is a bit confusing. FontLab shows the hint direction as up.
Previously Glyphs showed it correctly too and opening old files, shows it correct (as a positive value).
When I delete and remake the hint at the top, it becomes a negative value.
Ghost hints are negative and sometimes it is useful to reverse a hint
What exactly is the confusion? The hints in Glyphs connect to nodes and interpolate along with them, so you only need to set them in the first master. That is why they have those connectors. Ghost hints have negative widths in PS binaries to differentiate them mathematically from stem hints. But I wouldn’t use that to visualize them. Because you get into all kinds of trouble then. E.g. the difference between -20 and -21 is technically important but hard to visualize. We visualize that one is a top ghost, the other a bottom ghost. I think that makes more sense for a UI.
The blue dot and triangle are confusing, because they indicate that start, end, and direction for PS hints being relevant when they are not. A simplified UI, with only blue dots, no direction and only a positive value would probably be more Glyphs-like.
I’ll have a look at this. Thank you for the feedback
