User Guide

FontLab 4
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H i n t i ng Co m p o s i t e Gl y p h s
FontLab 4 allows you to set TrueType hints for the composite glyphs.
There is not much visible difference between hinting plain and composite
glyphs – Glyph window and tools look as if you are hinting decomposed
glyph.
The principle difference is that components of a composite glyph appear
already hinted. It means that if you have hinted glyph ‘E’ and hinted glyph
‘caron’ and if you want to check hinting in glyph ‘Ecaron’ you will see that
both components look exactly as they look in respective glyphs, and the
only thing you need to do is to hint their relative position.
Usually all you need to do to hint a composite glyph is to put a few middle-
delta instructions on the contours of accent components so they will get a
correct and symmetric position in the composite glyph.
You can however completely override hinting of components and provide
new hinting program for a composite glyph. In this case you may take a
composite glyph as a combination of all components as if it is decomposed.