User Guide

FontLab 4
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H i n t s A n d Li nk s La y er
Hints are used by the font rasterizer to improve a glyph’s appearance on
devices with low output resolution, like computer monitors or low-res
printers. A detailed description of the hinting methods and manual and
automatic hinting features available in FontLab is in the “Hinting” chapter.
For now we’ll just mention that in the Glyph Window you can see font-level
alignment zones and Type 1 character-level hints and links.
There are two hinting methods applied to Type 1 fonts (hints for True Type
fonts are always generated automatically): font-level hinting and
character-level hinting. Font-level hinting is generated automatically in
FontLab, so you don’t have to edit it manually.
Character-level hinting is applied to the characters’ stems:
Horizontal stem
Vertical stems
All important stems in a glyph should have stem hints, a pair of vertical or
horizontal lines. The information in the hint includes not just the position
of each of the two lines that “build” the hint, but also the position of one
(major) line and the width of the hint.
You can declare stem hints in FontLab just by dragging them and
modifying their width. Because hints in FontLab are very “intelligent,” they
automatically snap to the contour, minimising your work. In most cases
the autohinting algorithm that is included in FontLab produces good
results - usually not any worse than the results of manual hinting.
There is a special feature, called Hints Tracking that can be used with
hints. It will be described later, when we discuss editing hints.