I've also found that, plus they need to be blue.

Technically it can be anywhere, it's just that avoiding curves (or even tangents) is good practice because on a curve you have to ensure smoothness manually.

hhp

Somebody here (was it Miguel?) said that for historical reasons you should aim to place them so that the previous section (leading into the endpoint) is a straight line, where possible.

It's hard to draw a lot of Oo0 that way, but I'll give it a try.

Yes, it's not always possible :)

So, if it is not always possible, should it ever be required?

I'm not sure which old font format preferred things that way, or whether wholly curved glyphs posed problems, but I think it's safe to conclude it's not an issue for applications these days. FontLab, however, does sometimes do funny things to start points between curves, so I try to put them at the end of straight sections when possible. I'd be interested to hear others' methods.

Yeah, for some reason Fontlab seems to treat a start point on a curve as two points, which isn't a problem until you try interpolating between two glyphs where the start point is on a curve in one and not the other. Having said that, I'm struggling to get blend fonts to work very well at all, even when all points, start points and start point order are compatible.

FL's blend was written by the Kremlin's astrologer's shrink's Italian cousin Eddie Blendera.

Sometimes when I couldn't stand it anymore, I'd copy one blendend to the background, then copy the other blendend to the foreground, and bash one blendend into the shape of the other from the same friggin contour. That always works.

One very weird thing about blend fonts is it seems to make a difference which master you put in which box. Blend thin with black yields different results from blend black with thin!