Andy Clymer is a typeface designer and developer at Hoefler & Frere-Jones.
This was an 8 week course of the ins and outs of font production. Some topics that were covered were writing and testing OpenType features, using the RoboFab toolkit to build simple tools to automate repetitive tasks, getting naming and other font info tables set up the right way, and clearing up common bugs and error messages that inevitably come up during font production.
Having taken Ben Kiel’s Basic Python Programming workshop, I felt pretty confident jumping into this course. The first week or two covered the same basics as Ben’s class, but it was a nice refresher.
We spent a good amount of time learning about writing OpenType features such as ligatures, small caps, random cycles, and many more. Things like the importance of the order of which you write features, how to define groups, unicode values, and opentype feature support were also major topics covered. We also gathered a bunch of great resources like:
Opentype feature layout tag documentation
Hinting was the final topic covered where we learned all about overshoot zones, BlueValues, OtherBlues, FamilyBlues, FamilyOtherBlues, BlueFuzz, BlueShift, and BlueScale. The mantra for this session was: “No hints are better than bad hints”.
Hinting is the optimization of a truetype or postscript font for maximum readability on screen. Generally about 18pt is a good cut off to begin to look at hinting. Typefaces look great at high resolution and at larger sizes, but when reduced to smaller sizes on screen they are covered to smaller groups of pixels yielding distorted letterforms. This fine tuning was part of the reason why web was limited to only a handful of typefaces for the longest time.