Type1 hinting ForceBold

Has this item a different name? It doesn’t look like ForceBold is known by Glyphs?

Just noticed that Glyphs automatically sets ForceBold if the instance “is the :ballot_box_with_check: Bold of…”

Can you please, please give me a way to un-set ForceBold. In today’s word, ForceBold does more harm than good.

Can someone remind me what ForceBold does, please?

See https://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/font/T1Format.pdf :

At small sizes on low-resolution devices (such as display screens), features of bold characters may be rendered at only 1 pixel of thickness. Since this is the minimum thickness possible on a raster output device, normal (non-bold) characters also appear with 1-pixel wide features. If the boldness property is so important at these small sizes that bold characters should continue to appear thicker than normal characters, some Type 1 font interpreters may apply special techniques to thicken bold character features.

If the Private dictionary contains an entry named ForceBold, this behavior can be controlled explicitly. The value associated with ForceBold must be the Boolean value “true” or “false.” If the value is “true,” then in situations where character stems would normally be rendered at 1-pixel thick, a Type 1 font interpreter may thicken the stem. If the value is “false,” then a Type 1 font interpreter will not perform a special thickening operation.

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As always, it is important to test. Dont’t ask, “How should I set it?”, just see for yourself how the font renders differently (i.e. in Acrobat Reader, with and without antialiasing), and then choose. Whenever I tested, I chose not to set ForceBold.

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True, true. If it’s not tested, it’s broken.

I tried to reproduce the ForceBold issue, but I couldn’t. I exported a bold style-linked font, and the respective entry in the Private Dictionary read,

/ForceBold false def

Which version of Glyphs are you using? And how are you testing for the ForceBold?

Oops, sorry, I had relied on FontLab import. Same mistake once again. You are right, ForceBold is not set by Glyphs, it is set by FontLab on import (probably based on the bold bit) even if switched off in the OTF.

Apologies for the uproar. All is good.

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