FYI: The em square does not have to be 1000 units.

> FYI: The em square does not have to be 1000 units.

True! I guess I could change the Em to fit 13 more perfectly…

But I didn’t need to. I got a scoop of info from Apple! And best of All *it worked*. Anybody want to know what I found out?

I do! :)

I found out that yes, he was correct! OSX will take that set of data seriously, and if you say the Ascender value is 663, and you are on the money with your outlines ( pixel perfect) in terms of height and that is that is say 693em, the render engine will make it look (at 12 or 13 pts) like you are overshooting 693 by 30em even though you are technically bang on the pixel! If you fix it so the Ascender value is correct that smudge at the top of your ascender goes away.

This also means that (in the reverse of what I did, but more normally) you can tweak your ascender value to make a clearer screen render in OSX even if your font does not match a pixel perfect height for a particular pixel res pt size in it’s ascender outlines.

Windows uses hints instead.

Both cases involved TT fonts - I haven’t checked the PS Type 1 font to see if it is true there too. I suspect it is.

Later on I will have to write to this fellow again & ask if there is a paper of FAQ on the OSX render engine & font design so I can design with it’s features in mind. If I find it helpful would you like to know about it as well?

If this is confusing to folks, I can post images later.

Lauri, your new icon is very cool !

Eben,

Thanks for all the information! I won’t need it right now, but I’ll make a mental note of it for future use when I’m doing hinting or wanting pixel-perfection at different point sizes. I’m always interested in all the nitty-gritty small details, and I always end up using a calculator when I’m designing fonts. I haven’t really finished any fonts yet, I’m working on a blocky stencil font similar to Futura Black at the moment, we’ll see how that turns out.

You’re putting a lot of work into Software Developer, and it’s looking really good, I bet you’ll find a lot users for it.

I’m glad you liked the icon, I thought I’d give it some subtle movement that isn’t distracting.

Lauri,

I hope I do find those users! I hope the font is useful.

I have an idea I may figure out a few more things. If I do I’ll post them here or in a new thread.

Will you post some preliminary images of your font?

I like the surprise of the icon. the way it seems to be normal & then suddenly isn’t. That seems quite a bit better than an icon which just pulses!

Eben,

I’m certain you’ll find users for your font. There has to be tons of programmers and html coders that are tired of the standard Windows/Mac fonts, and want to use something more exciting in their text editors.

I will post some images of the font I’m working on when I have put some more time into it, but if you’re interested I’ll e-mail you a couple of preliminary images.

Have you thought about how you’ll distribute your font? Own website, MyFonts, T.26, Veer, etc?

Eben, nice detective work on the OS X font renderer.

Lauri, I hope you are right. I am going to do it in any event. I am pretty committed now. And I have been given some great help here & else where. As far as distribution I am totally open. I suppose some part of me would like to ( hubris here ) see a maximum distibution if it turns out to be really useful which would argue for attempting to get the font integrated into an OS. That’s pretty far fetched I know! After that I am not sure what makes the most sense. Some other exclusive license to a company would make the most sense as far as being paid… I don’t know. I need to make the font excellent & test it really well before I worry too much about that.

I would love to see your images. Please let me know if you want feedback, questions or if I should keep my trap closed. ;-)

Mark, Thanks!

Eben,

For maximum distribution through foundries, I’d probably shoot for FontFont or Linotype. And if you’d want you font integrated into an OS you could always talk to Simon Daniels or John Hudson for Windows; not sure who to talk to for other OS’s. If I recall correctly there’s already a new monospaced typeface created for Longhorn/Vista so that might be a tough sell.

If you don’t care about making money on the font you could talk to the people distributing different Linux versions, they’d probably be happy to have an extra typeface, and it could lead to commisions. [This might be bad advice with all the talk on free fonts.]

Another option would be to talk to software companies and see if they would want to license the typeface for any of their products (programming related).

I’ll shoot you an e-mail, thanks!