Typophile

My font looks uneven on screen when small (but prints fine) - please help

Pat2

I made a Times New Roman clone. It's derived from FreeSerif and Liberation Serif and I used Fontlab Studio 5 to produce it, but I'm not a typographer by training (we don't have the funds to hire one at the moment).

The font looks fine in print, and it's ok on screen when the font size or screen magnification is sufficient, but if I choose a small font size or change the magnification in Word 2010 to make it look small on screen, then the letters appear uneven.

I attached several PNG screenshots from Word to illustrate the problem. The first is with 100% magnification, the second with 150% magnification. If you look closely at the 12 pt sample in the first pic, you'll notice how certain letters of My Serif (temp name) appear shorter than others, for example, u i r w x ... The pics also include the same text in Times New Roman for comparison of how My Serif should look.

At 24 pt size or at 150% magnification the characters appear level though, and their outlines are even in height in FontLab Studio, so is there something I could do to fix this appearance issue?

Thanks in advance.

AttachmentSize
serifs at 100 magnification.PNG40.79 KB
serifs at 150 magnification.PNG73.49 KB
Riccardo Sartori

http://typophile.com/search/google/hinting

kentlew

If this is on Mac, then you probably don’t need to worry about full-on hinting. It could just be incorrect alignment zones (possibly inherited from sources). That, or possibly bad blue scale values not correctly managing overshoots.

Pat2

Unfortunately this is on Windows and the sources look fine (so not an inheritance issue). I take it I need to hint each character, which is something I'll be learning as I do it. Is there a quick way to do it, or is this something that has to be done one character at a time? fwiw, I applied FontLab's Autohinting (F7) to the whole font, but it didn't fix the problem.

Frode Bo Helland

Manual TrueType hinting is done one character at a time. Note that there’s a difference between TrueType hinting and Postscript Hinting. Fontlab’s PS autohinting isn’t half bad, the other one have a tendency to bloat the file size without much better rendering results.

Truetype hinting gets more complicated the older the systems you want to support are, and for text sizes Truetype is still unfortunately the only format that “works” on screen in Windows.

Hrant H Papazian

Correcting the alignment issues you're seeing does not require
extensive superhinting of individual glyphs; as was mentioned
it's a much simpler issue with vertical zones.

BTW for older (read: Win-XP) systems in b&w you could use
the GASP table to make all sizes render anti-aliased, resulting in
blurry but passable rendering (essentially equivalent to OSX).
However some of your thin parts might need to be thickened.

hhp

Pat2

thanks for the help.

below is a pic of u from My Serif and Liberation Serif open in FontLab's TrueType Hinting Winfow (Ctrl+Shift+F7). If anyone knows how to copy or transfer the hinting from one to the other without changing the character's outline, please let me know. (fwiw, I'm of course also reading FontLab's manual to find the answers.)

Frode Bo Helland

You can’t.

Richard Fink

@pat2

I deal with - and fix - issues like this nearly every day. Since your sources are open-source I assume you won't mind sending the original vfb file from which the font you have pictured is generated.

If you send it over to me, I'd be happy to take a look. (After fixing, I have no interest in keeping it or using it for anything - although I might take some screen shots for educational purposes - I'll simply send it back to you and delete on my end.)

There's just too much back-and-forth questioning involved to handle hinting-related stuff like this within a forum thread.

My address is rfink at the same domain as my blog or at kernest.com.

Richard Fink
Blog: Readable Web
Type Director: Kernest/Konstellations

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