- #Transtype font hinting how to
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- #Transtype font hinting code
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- #Transtype font hinting windows
Horizontal metrics (width and left sidebearing) of each character
#Transtype font hinting windows
Glyph metrics used historically by OS/2 and Windows platformsīasic information for horizontal typesetting Listing table info for "TTXTest-Regular.otf":Īll apart from the first two tables in our file are required in every TrueType and OpenType font. Now let’s prod at it with ttx.įirst, let’s list what tables we have present in the font: To begin investigating how OpenType works, I started by creating a completely empty font in Glyphs, turned off exporting all glyphs apart from the letter “A” - which has no paths - and exported it as an OpenType file. The XML format is still designed primarily to be read by computers rather than humans, but it at least allows us to peek inside the contents of an OpenType font which would otherwise be totally opaque to us. It is used to turn an SFNT database into a textual representation, XML, and back again. But because the SFNT representation is binary - that is to say, not human readable - it’s not very easy for us either to investigate what’s going on in the font or to make changes to it. OpenType, TrueType, PostScript and a few other font types all use the SFNT representation to lay out their tables into a binary file. The database, with its various tables, is stored in a file using a format called SFNT, which stands for “spline font” or “scalable font”. But fonttools includes a number of programs already written using the library, and one of these is called ttx.Īs we mentioned above, an OpenType font file is a database.
#Transtype font hinting code
The core of the fonttools package is a library, some code which helps Python programmers to write programs for manipulating font files.
#Transtype font hinting mac os
Homebrew is a system which allows you to easily install and manage a number of useful free software packages on Mac OS X. If you’re on Linux, you already know what you’re doing. If you’re a Windows user, I’m afraid you’re on your own Windows has never made it particularly easy to operate the computer through the command prompt, and it’s too painful to explain it here. If you’re a Mac user and you’re not familiar with using a terminal emulator, pick up a copy of Learning Unix for OS X by Dave Taylor. If you don’t have fonttools already installed, you can get hold of it by issuing the following commands at a command prompt: fonttools was originally written by Just van Rossum, but is now maintained by Cosimo Lupo and a cast of hundreds.
#Transtype font hinting crack
To crack open that OTF file and look at the tables inside, we’re going to use a set of Python programs called fonttools. Each of these pieces of information is stored inside a table, which is laid out in a binary (non-human-readable) representation inside your OTF file.
#Transtype font hinting how to
The computer is much more concerned with details about how the font is formatted, the glyphs that it supports, the heights, widths and sidebearings of those glyphs, how to lay them out relative to other glyphs, and what clever things in terms of kerns, ligatures and so on need to be applied. In other words, most of the information in a font is not the little black shapes that you look at they’re easy. A simplified schematic representation of a font file would look like this:
Some of the information is global, in the sense that it refers to the font as a whole, and some of the information refers to individual glyphs within the font. It’s a related collection of tables - lists of information. What is a font?įrom a computer’s perspective, a font is a database. So put on your overalls, grab your bucket, and let’s take a look inside the font sausage factory. In an ideal world, this would be information that programmers of layout systems and font handling libraries would need, but implementation details that font designers could safely ignore.īut we are not in an ideal world, and as we will see when we start discussing the metrics tables, the implementation details matter for font designers too - different operating systems, browsers and applications will potentially interpret the information contained within a font file in different ways leading to different layout. In this chapter we’re going to look in some depth about the OpenType font format: how it actually converts the outlines, metrics and advanced typographic features of a font into a file that a computer can interpret. They say that if you enjoy sausages, you shouldn’t look too carefully into how they are made, and the same is true of OpenType fonts.
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