User Guide

developing PostScript fonts, for instance, you could decide
that you never want to look at any serif hints, or diagonal
hints, since those kinds of hints can’t be applied to
PostScript fonts. By unchecking “Serif hints” and “Diagonal
hints,” those hint types will never appear in the Outline
Window.
Hint order
Changing hint ordering is useful for PostScript Type 1 and
TrueType fonts. Since PostScript doesn’t handle
overlapping hints, you sometimes need to specify which of
the overlapping hints should get used—the hints closest to
the outline in the window are the ones that will get used in
the case of overlap. Typically, you will want to apply the
most frequent hints first, on the grounds that they will work
best for that character in comparison to the rest of the font.
(Hint frequency is based on examining all the hints in the
entire font and sorting them according to frequency of
occurrence.) Usually, changing these pop-ups will result in
changes in hint ordering which you can see in the Hints
layer of the Outline Window.
Hint direction
The hint direction tells which way the outline will be
adjusted during gridfitting (aligning the outline to the
pixel “grid” used by the screen and/or printer). Generally,
you want all your hints to point inwards (“Toward center”),
but that is not always the case; so we included these pop-
ups as a way to customize this behavior easily for entire
characters. (Individual hints can have their direction
changed on a hint-by-hint basis, in the Hints layer of the
Outline Window.) Hint direction makes a difference for
TrueType, but if it affects PostScript, we haven’t been able
to detect it.
Common stems
Changing these fields is useful for PostScript Type 1 and
TrueType fonts. These fields are calculated by examining all
the stems in the font, and finding which widths are the most
popular (i.e., occur the most). These values appear here,
and get output in the PostScript font as StdHW, StdVW,
StemSnapH, and StemSnapV. See the Adobe Type One
Font Format book for more information on these fields. To
Fontographer User's Manual
10: Expert Advice Page #27