[OpenFontLibrary] hinting workflow

[Peter Baker]

On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 6:50 AM, Ben Laenen <benlaenen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Eric Schrijver wrote:
>> For now I agree with Dave that XgridFit would be the most logical format
>> to use, since it is already an XML based format and already in use in
>> the FOSS toolchain…
>
> But will Fontlab etc really support a whole new hinting language? I can't see
> them being bothered to go any further than supporting plain ttf instructions.

They won't, and there's no reason they should. There's also no reason,
I think, for RoboFab to take any account of Xgridfit, which is *not* a
format for storing TT instructions but rather a high-level language
specialized for TT hinting.

I think that UFO would benefit from having some standard way of
storing TT instructions in its XML. Simply storing raw instructions
inside an element with some standardized name would be nice, though
coming up with some sort of simple XML markup scheme might add the
possibility down the line of finer programmatic control. Then, later,
RoboFab might consider adding some support: e.g. methods for adding
instructions to a glyph, for editing them, for passing them to FontLab
(or whatever) when it's time to generate a font. But the first thing
is just to come up with a way to store them in a UFO.

>> I do think all this shows hinting is still a bit of a black art. Am I
>> correct in thinking that most projects could at first get by using the
>> automated hinting of the design programs? Or is that typographic
>> blasphemy :)
>
> Well, you can get some results out of the FF autohinter. Question is just
> whether it'll produce anything good... You can improve it by editing the
> parameters for PS hinting, but if you're putting effort in that you can just
> as well put the effort in ttf hinting at once...
>
>
>> What do you think?
>> Fontforge could for example do automatic hinting at the same time it
>> generates the (o/t)tf’s from the ufo.
>
> It actually has a setting to generate automatic hinting when generating a
> ttf/otf right now.

I think the FF autohinter and autoinstructor are quite good, though it
is still necessary to intervene by hand sometimes--either early by
fiddling with the PS hints or late by editing the automatically
generated instructions.

The gold standard is a graphical tool. There are two that I know of,
the Microsoft tool which I've never seen, and the one in FontLab which
I used many versions ago, before I started using Open Source tools
exclusively. I'm sure that these things are not trivial to program,
and I'm not surprised that no one in the Open Source world has taken
on the task.

Peter