Behind-the-scenes look at making fonts | Hacker News Reader

Behind-the-scenes look at making fonts

ilovetypography.com

9 pointstblancpain6 comments

Thierry here from Grilli Type – we released GT Sectra. Let me know if you have any questions or comments!

The article didn't show all the letters in the font, but 'y' caught my eye. Was the space between intended?

Hey! Yes, every element of this typeface was labored over and discussed in detail again and again throughout its three year design process.

On page 6 of the specimen PDF (http://grillitype.com/sites/default/files/specimen/GT-Sectra...) you can read about some of the design elements and why we chose them. The ink trap in the lowercase y is one of the stylistic ink traps, designed to create a higher contrast and add visual sharpness to the typeface.

Zooming out on the sample page ( http://grillitype.com/typefaces/gt-sectra ) seems to indicate there is no font hinting. I think it would be nice if you'd indicate to customers that it's a bad idea to use this font in low-dpi situations.

Font hinting is relative, and there’s many levels of font hinting. To simplify (a lot), the main levels are: 1) Absolutely no hinting information present 2) Auto-hinting process used to create hinting information 3) Manual hinting process used to create hinting information

Our typefaces for the web are auto-hinted, the only realistic possibility for smaller foundries. We hint them with all possible auto-hinting tools and then decide which one looks best (per style) across all rendering environments. The results will never be perfect, but absolutely acceptable across a large number of rendering environments and type sizes used.

No auto-hinted font is going to look perfect at 8px sizes, for that you absolutely need hand-hinted fonts (and even then they look like crap). But hand-hinting a font costs thousands of dollars per style – or about $50 per character, more or less. Only big foundries and operating system providers like Microsoft can do that. GT Sectra for example contains around 900 glyphs per style, across 30 styles.

Additionally, the whole industry is moving away from manual hinting, as more and more high-dpi devices are on the market, and operating systems’ rendering of typefaces becomes less and less dependent on hinting information (OS X ignores it completely, for example). It’s just not an investment that’s really worth it going forward.

You can see GT Sectra in small use for example in use on http://reportagen.com – and it holds up pretty decently in my opinion. Or don’t you think?

Thanks a lot for the detailed information! Personally i still wish people would not release unhinted fonts, because they are invariably used by people who're completely oblivious to the difference and simply make large swathes of text nigh-unreadable.

That said, the usage on reportagen.com does impress me. It's by no means perfect (A and other uppercase letters could use some love), but otherwise the width of vertical lines is consistent overall, making it quite readable even at small font sizes and without anti-aliasing.

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