I set up a rather coarse grid for a rather contructed typeface.
But this also forces the indirect corners that will be created after “remove overlap” parts on that grid, distorting the lines. Is there a way to turn this off? I don’t actually need each anchor point to be on the grid. I just want to have the grid to help me during the design stage.
Or is there a better way for such a design grid? I also played around with adding a guidelines every 20 points, but that gets messy pretty quickly.
What do you want to turn off? If you remove overlap on such a grid, then the points will of course need to be placed on the grid.
You can disable overlap removal for export.
As soon as I add the cross-bar, the diagonal lines are changed, so that the cross-bar meets the diagonal lines at grid points. I don’t want the cross-bar to influence the diagonal lines.
You can turn off the preview of the contour with this command:
Font.previewRemoveOverlap = False
but the points will still snap to the grid when the font is exported.
Maybe it would work better to reduce the upm to match your current grid, use a grid of 1 unit, and then scale up the upm on export via custom parameter? That way, the exported shapes are not restricted by the grid.
Or add a subdivision. That way you still can align your main nodes on the main grid lines but stil have some extra space.