Nu Serif TrueType hinting adventures

I'm now working on Nu Serif in Microsoft's Visual TrueType program. This is the hinting stage, where I hand edit the hinting instructions of the font to achieve great on-screen readability. I had some initial problems with FontLab (good thing I use Font Validator on FontLab's output). I'm still getting "multiple component glyph scaling flags set" error messages (which will really crash your system hard if they are installed) in every other generation of fonts from FontLab. I have no explanation for this - without changing any settings, I got good results the next time. Weird. Hopefully they'll nail down the problem in the next release.

I've already hinted the uppercase control characters (H, I, O, V) and I was surprised by how easy the process was. In fact, the serifs don't create much of a problem. The trick is to always do them the same way. That way you can build up speed while achieving consistent results in the font. I'm also finally getting the hang of the "stroke" function (this is the one that works with characters that have diagonal elements, like "V" or "W". At first, this function was giving me a stroke! But I've got a pretty easy rule of thumb: first and third points must have horizontal and vertical control, second and fourth must have either horizontal or vertical control, but not both. The reason for this approach is that in order for the stroke function to do its job, it needs freedom to move in either direction on half the points. If that all sounds complicated, believe me, it isn't once you've got the hang of the program :-)

Tomorrow, I help my friend Daisy move furniture. She formerly had her boyfriend (who she hasn't talked to in 3 months - she doesn't think that they are going out anymore :-) help her move stuff. I was the guy she went to movies with. Marty = Movie, Boyfriend = Moving. So maybe this is a step up for me? Who knows?