Preparing to Ship Your Font

You’ve finished hinting. You’ve compiled the font, approved the printed version, reduced the amount of space required by the font, and saved all the results. Before the font is ready for users, you have to do one more task: prepare the font for shipping.

The saved version of your font file contains all the source data for the hinting you’ve done. You should keep that file in case you later decide to do additional hinting to the font or want to import glyphs from it to hint another font.

Note You must recalculate the ‘maxp’ table before preparing to ship your font (see “Reducing Memory Requirements”).

The version you give to users should not contain all those Visual TrueType-related private tables—users don’t need that hinting data. Including it in the font not only increases the disk space required by the font, but also gives away data you should protect. Otherwise, users can see how you hinted the font and change it, hint a new version of the font, and otherwise appropriate your work.

Before distributing the font to any users, prepare a “ship” version that’s been stripped of that private data. Visual TrueType removes the Visual TrueType source code and the TrueType source code (or glyph program) assembled from that Visual TrueType source code, but not the binary TrueType ‘glyf’ table created from the TrueType source code.

Ship font dialog

Be sure to rename the version you’ll be shipping to users.

Save the ship version with a new file name, and keep that version separate from your source file of the font. Use that shipped version to make copies of the font for users.

If you forget to rename the file, a prompt asks you to confirm that you want to overwrite the version that contains all your hinting.

Because “shipping” the font strips out all that work, you don’t want to overwrite the original version. Click Cancel, click Prepare Font again, and change the name of the shipped version.

To prepare a font for shipping

1.       On the Tools menu, click Ship Font.

2.      Specify where you want to save the new file.

3.      In the “File name” field, type a new file name.

4.     Click Ship.