Re: TAN: Fonts

On Thu, 29 Jul 1999, Terrence Donnelly wrote:

> I'm having a problem with making a TrueType font, and I thought maybe someone
> on this list might have some insight.
>
> The font is ligatured, so each letter connects to the next.  I've
> done this by having each letter extend slightly further to the right
> than its stated character width.  When I install the font and test
> it, it prints fine, with smooth joins, but on the screen, there
> appear to be gaps between the letters.  I'm assuming there is some
> conflict here between screen and printer resolutions, but I don't
> know how to resolve it.
>
> -- Terry
>
While fiddling with the width is the academically accepted way of making
ligatures and accents, Microsoft doesn't support it really, and whether
it works on-screen depends very much on which wordprocessor you use. For
instance, with Lotus Word it never works; the later version of Microsoft
Word can be too smart (and, for instance, advance the cursor with the
width of the smallest character in your font), but Word 2 works fine,
almost always. It all depends on how smart the kerning interpretation
of the wordprocessor is.

I don't have a recent version of Windows myself (I stopped at 95, release
1), so I don't know how this works with 98 and NT, but I know that the
rendering engine in NT is vastly different from the one in 95 - to the
point that the height of a 12-point character isn't the same in pixels!

What software do you use for making your font? Have you tried using a
PostScript font instead of a TrueType? I use Fontlab 2.5 and ScanFont
myself.

Boudewijn Rempt  | http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt