90 Second Global PS Hinting¶
Intermediate-Advanced
This is for advanced or intermediate designers who know what all this is about. If you need a refresher or if you are new to PS hinting, see this tutorial.
Here’s a checklist to make sure you got everything!!
Font and Family Zones (Blues)¶
Font Zones¶
Zones settings are located in menu: File > Font Info… > Zones.
Use the plus and minus sign to add and remove zones. Use the diamond 💎 to auto generate.
Here’s an example of some manually added zones.▼
= the vertical location (y-value).
=the thickness of the zone.
Warning
Don’t use negative values for zone thickness!
Tags make the zones only appear for those glyphs. However, tags to not impact autoHinting.
Family Zones¶
Why use Family Zones?
If you don’t have family zones, at small sizes, your regular and bold might have different heights!
Push the Family zones tab at the bottom.
Manually add your main fonts values here.
Stems¶
Stem values help you vertical shapes look crisper at small sizes.
Go to File > Font Info > Stems
These stem values should be set equal to you main stems, both straight and round.
The values also impacts the behavior of “suggest stems”, so if you know your stems, it can be a good idea to set this earlier in the font design process.
Other Blues¶
BlueScale, BlueShift, BlueFuzz¶
These are important in determining how overshoot suppression will work.
The other blues are located in Font Info > Other Values > PostScript hinting.
If you need a refresher on this, see the main autohinting article.
AutoHinting Settings¶
Please Note
In order to get good autohinting results you will usually need to change these.
In the same place (Font Info > Other Values > PostScript hinting)▼
Tip
Adjust these closer to your actual stem settings in each master.
Info
These settings will interpolate.
Hinting Export Settings¶
You can customize the exports.
Go to menu: File > Export Profiles…
Preferences¶
There are also two minor settings for autohinting in Preferences > Autohinting > PostScript Autohinting:
That’s it! If you need more info see the main article.
Best to you!