User Guide

Hinting
521
A l i g nm e n t In s t r u c t i o n s
Alignment instructions are used to align points to the grid. There are two
types of alignment instructions: those linked with alignment zones and
those not linked with zones.
Alignment Zones
Alignment zones define important vertical positions that are common to
many font characters. A good example of an alignment zone is a baseline
and the bottom position of the ‘O’ character:
Bottom alignment zone
At low PPM sizes you must set the bottom point of the characters ‘O’, ‘C’
and similar characters to the baseline to suppress the bottom overshoot. In
this case we have a so-called bottom alignment zone.
Another example of an alignment zone is the top line of the ‘H’ character
and the ‘O’ character:
Top alignment zone
Alignment zones are previewed in the Glyph Window with a gray color.
You can set and edit alignment zones in the Alignment page of the
FontInfo dialog box. See page 193 for a detailed description of this page.
TrueType alignment zones are the same as those used in Type 1 font-level
hinting.