User Guide

dialog box, find a zone which has zeros in it, and enter new
values. If there are no zones with zeros, that means all the
available zones are used up, and you will have to remove an
existing zone in order to add a new one.
Hint Parameters
Choosing “Hint Parameters” from the Hints menu brings up
this dialog box.
Hint Parameters, like most of the other dialog boxes, will
affect different groups of characters, depending upon
which window you are in when you bring it up. If you are in
the Outline Window, it will only affect the hints of that
character. If you bring it up from the Font Window, it will
affect all the currently selected characters.
Type 1 fonts have a restriction that hints cannot overlap.
There is a way to get around this, known as “hint
replacement,” but the technique is not implemented in
Fontographer. Maybe someday the Type 1 font renderer
will be changed to handle overlapping hints. This mainly
affects serifs, which require overlapping hints to control the
serif width on each side of the stem. Without overlapping
hints or hint replacement, serif widths are uncontrolled.
Fortunately, this effect is not generally a serious problem in
practice.
Fontographer applies heuristics to pick which hints to keep
and which to ignore when sorting through overlapping
hints. You can override this by changing the pop-ups
in “Hint order” so you can control whether the most
frequent hints get applied first, or the largest, or some other
option.
Hints to include
This is a way to suppress entire groups of hints. If you are
Fontographer User's Manual
10: Expert Advice Page #26