I am trying to apply ttfautohint to a font generated in FontForge, but I
seem to be having problems with the "strong stem width and positioning"
settings. As far as I understand, this is supposed to toggle the
snapping of horizontal strokes to the pixel grid. I've tried setting
this to either 'smooth' or 'strong' for all three Windows targets
(grayscale, GDI ClearType, DW ClearType), but I barely see any
difference in the results.
The way my font is designed, the "-" (hyphen) for instance is one pixel wide at 12pt, and two at 24pt. I'd like this width to be properly anti-aliased when I vary the font size (that is, what I want is the 'smooth' option here). But that never happens, no matter what I set it to; I still get discrete steps in width -- the hyphen stays one pixel wide up to 17pt, then abruptly becomes two pixels wide at 18pt.
Needless to say, this greatly distorts the appearance of my font. There *are* some minimal differences in rendering when I compare the 'smooth' and 'strong' settings, but they're pretty much unnoticeable, and the long straight horizontal strokes are not affected.
FWIW, I'm testing on Windows 7. My font doesn't suffer from this issue on Linux and Mac. I know that Windows renderers are notoriously overzealous with snapping outlines to the pixel grid, but can this be salvaged somehow? Am I missing some setting e.g. in the 'Grid Fitting' table that could solve this?
The way my font is designed, the "-" (hyphen) for instance is one pixel wide at 12pt, and two at 24pt. I'd like this width to be properly anti-aliased when I vary the font size (that is, what I want is the 'smooth' option here). But that never happens, no matter what I set it to; I still get discrete steps in width -- the hyphen stays one pixel wide up to 17pt, then abruptly becomes two pixels wide at 18pt.
Needless to say, this greatly distorts the appearance of my font. There *are* some minimal differences in rendering when I compare the 'smooth' and 'strong' settings, but they're pretty much unnoticeable, and the long straight horizontal strokes are not affected.
FWIW, I'm testing on Windows 7. My font doesn't suffer from this issue on Linux and Mac. I know that Windows renderers are notoriously overzealous with snapping outlines to the pixel grid, but can this be salvaged somehow? Am I missing some setting e.g. in the 'Grid Fitting' table that could solve this?