🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan26.193324.8942@wri.com> andre@rurutu.wri.com (Andre Kuzniarek) writes:

   I've got some questions about font design that I'm hoping the informed  
   people on this newsgroup might be able to help me with. I will summarize  
   any e-mail responses.

   1) What is the best, or to be less vague, what is the most *professional*  
   font design application available on any platform (UNIX, Mac, DOS, etc).  
   I'm assuming the professional font design houses are using stuff other  
   than Fontographer or FontStudio. I'm wondering if it isn't custom software  
   and if it's generally available.

For designing the outlines themselves, Ikarus M from URW.  For hinting there
isn't anything that one can afford.  If your rich call Adobe ask for BuildFont.

   2) I am currently using Fontographer, and find it pretty useful, but I'm  
   having trouble with creating good font hints for my Type 1 designs. In  
   testing the process, I've been re-drawing Times-Roman, based on a template  
   of the original. I'm following all the rules about tangent control points  
   etc. that supposedly make the Nimbus Q font hinting algorithms work best.  
   In comparison to the original, my clone font shares most of the same  
   control points just by nature of these rules, and I'm even editing the  
   hints manually to achieve the greatest possible similarity to the original  
   (as far as I can tell from decoding the Type 1 file in Fontographer). My  
   results, however, do not quite match the original, and are not  
   particularly great. Adobe's outlines don't rasterize to look as well as  
   their hand-tuned bitmap, but it still looks a bit better than what I get  
   from Fontographer. 

Right, automatic hinting is very much better than no hinting, but not
nearly as good as commercial grade hinting.  For one thing, none of these
tools provides for hint replacement, which, while not needed for every
character, is crucial for quality rendering.

   I'm beginning to assume that font hinting is an arcane process that  
   requires font developers to spend enormous amounts of time doing empirical  
   tests. We're talking more time than actually drawing the font. Is there a  
   better way to build hints (better software?) , so as not to have to resort  
   to hand tuned bitmaps?

The main problem is that the rendering algorithm is not described.  So
while the language for writing Type 1 hints, including hint replacement,
is easily accessible to anyone who cares to buy the book, it isn't obvious
what to write in that language once you get past the obvious.  For example,
the naive view of how it works would suggest that setting up some hints
and then immediately replacing them makes no sense whatever, yet many
commercial fonts do just that.  That's just for a start...

Berthold K.P. Horn
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA