I’m planning to do a Truetype flavoured OTF hinted with Ttfautohinter. I’m looking for opinions on what would be the best way to approach this. I remember Mekkablue recommending Fontprep (Which I have purchased a year ago) instead of Ttfautohinter. Doesn’t Fontprep use the Ttfautohinter engine? Anyway, Fontprep outputs TTFs so is there a way to get the hints from the generated TTFs to the final OTF files? Or should I try something completely different instead?
The basic Glyphs autohinting doesn’t produce satisfactory hinting for this particular font so I thought I might try Ttfautohinter as I’ve had good experiences with it in the past. I can’t go completely manual because of the time/money constrains.
Currently, Glyphs cannot produce TT instructions, only PS hints. A TTF produced with Glyphs will still need to be TT-hinted, and also need a DSIG (for MS Office). That is why you get that “Needs to be regenerated in FontLab” message. But of course, you can also use FontForge (that is what I do) or a combination of ttfautohint and ttx to insert both instructions and the DSIG.
FontPrep is specifically geared towards building webfonts. I recommend it above my own webfontmaker scripts.
This may be out of scope of this forum, but how to copy hints from TTF to OTF? Either with Fontlab or TTX? Can anyone suggest good links to read about this?
Sorry I said it wrong. What I’m thinking of is to have the auto-hints inserted back to the font master (TT outlines). It’s just for peace-of-mind purposes. When I have proofed the autohints one time (maybe with some manual changes) and if I have to do some changes to the masters (not the outlines of course) later on, I don’t have to go trough the Ttfautohinter and proofing again. Makes sense?
There is no way of storing tt instructions in a usable way outside of the .ttf file. They are binary code that deepens to much on the prep and fpgm tables. And TTFautohind uses quite a few tricks that can’t be fully decompiled.