Postscript hinting questions

Glyphs
1

  1. If I have a composite glyph (e.g. amacron) and I hint one glyph (macron) but not the other, the other glyph (a) doens’t get autohinted in the composite. Is there no way to get the other glyph autohinted?

  2. What happens when I have two manually hinted masters for which the hints are not compatible (e.g. a light where the stems do not overlap, then a bold where the stems do overlap so there are fewer in the bold) are the intermediate instances just autohinted?

  3. What can I do about these inconsistencies. Note abreve and adieresis, particularly at 21, 22, 23, are different widths to the a.

2

Only the first master’s hints are taken into account. Hints in other masters are ignored.

3

This is a FontLab screenshot. Are you hinting your fonts for use in FontLab? I strongly recommend you test your font in the environment it is going to be used in. Especially PS hints are very dependent on the renderer.

You could remove hints and autohint with the LayerGeek plugin.

4

Thanks for the suggestion with LayerGeek. I’m looking at the FL preview because actually it came the closest to a lo-res laser print out in this case!

5

Bad idea. Test your font on the actual device. Every rasteriser version does it differently. Remember: PS hinting means ‘dumb font, smart renderer’.