PS Autohinting blues

Topy20 October 2012 · 07:41

My autohinting endeavour did not produce that great results. What I did was:
- FL autohinted everything
- Defined the bluescale according to the largest verical alignment zone (47). So Bluescale is 0.021276, Blueshift 10 (max. overshoot value for round shapes), Bluefuzz = 2 just in case.
-Did the auto zones with green diamond: -30,0 504, 519 697, 744 -220, -193. I checked that they are quite accurate.
-Auto stems. V: 78, 100. H: 72, 54, 100. These are true.
-Then I removed all previous hints and ran the Adobe FDK Autohinter.

Now, in very small sizes, everything is aligning quite nicely. Problems occur in a bit larger sizes, all overshoots seem to align one pixel off from the baseline and x-height. See the screenshot attached. Same thing happens with FL autohinter and also when I remove all hints leaving the stem and zone settings. Any idea what I'm doing wrong? I'm guessing something is wrong with the blue-settings, because frankly I'm not sure how to set them up correcly.

The screenshot is from Indesign CS4, Mac OSX 10.6.

Attachment	Size
Screen shot 2012-10-20 at 1.20.38 PM.png	46.29 KB

John Hudson20 October 2012 · 10:44

You have points at extrema? When I see this kind of jumpiness, my usual suspicion is that the hints are not catching the outlines because points are in the wrong place.

Topy21 October 2012 · 00:54

Yes, points are in right places. I was going to add another screenshot to prove it to you, but I can't see the Attachment -feature here anymore.

Mark Simonson21 October 2012 · 11:56

You need to be running the Flash plug-in in your web browser to see the "Insert Image" link and to insert images.

Mark Simonson21 October 2012 · 13:05

I haven't been able to find a citation, but I've always heard that 25 units is the maximum value for an alignment zone.

Chris Lozos21 October 2012 · 13:22

Jan Żurawski21 October 2012 · 16:09

"-30,0 504, 519 697, 744 -220, -193"
try (my guesswork):
-10, 0 504, 519 697, 712 729, 744 -220, -193
I cannot achieve such an effect (in CS5.5), could be InD CS4 thing?

Topy22 October 2012 · 10:48

Well I guess that 25 unit limit must be true. After limiting zones to 25 and updating the Bluescale accordingly, everything is aligning as it should. Breaking up those zones into smaller ones is a good idea too. Thanks for the help everybody!

Jan Żurawski22 October 2012 · 15:24

blue zones and hints: lc a, SourceSans by Paul D. Hunt, Adobe

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