Hinting is a subjective and complex art. You’ve developed your own approach to hinting, work habits that you can continue with Visual TrueType. This user guide introduces hinting tasks in a typical order that you can follow or not, based on your experience and the font itself. In general, you should:
· Review the glyph and, if necessary, add, remove, and adjust existing control points. Hinting is about controlling points on the glyph outline. You control points in relation to points already hinted or in relation to some absolute X or Y value from the origin.
· Hint in the Y direction, then hint in the X direction. The X and Y axes are independent for hinting except for diagonals and italics. Visual TrueType can limit its display to only Y hints or only X hints, so you don’t become confused.
· Link control points before you interpolate between them. Linking creates relationships between two or more points. Interpolating maintains the relative position of one or more linked points between the first and last points in the same link.
· Do all global hinting before adding local hints to create exceptions. These local hints fine-tune hinting on a glyph by moving a single control point by a specific distance at a single ppem size.