Bad vertical alignment of u

[johannschopplich]

Describe the bug
The character u is missaligned vertically

To Reproduce
Install hinted TTF version of Inter UI on an Windows machine and write something down.

Screenshots

Environment

• Version: Inter UI 3.0 RC1 (TTF hinted)
• OS: Windows 10

[rsms]

Yikes! Did you try the unhinted version? Also, are you using the traditional font files or the “variable” ones?

[johannschopplich]

I will try the unhinted version for comparison. No, I'm using the traditional hinted TTF version.

[johannschopplich]

Tested it. Seems like a hinting problem. I guess there's nothing you can do then.

[rsms]

We can definitely fix this :–)

Some glyphs are composed from other glyphs via something called "components" — a sort of hyperlink. This is the case with "u", which is an instance of the "n" component mirrored on the Y axis. However, I'm suspecting that autohint introduces TTF hints on the "n" glyph which flow over to the "u" glyph, but as "u" is transformed to mirror, the TTF hints will be off.

Here's a build with "u" as a regular glyph rather than a component:
Inter-UI-3.0-7bf2380cf3.zip

[johannschopplich]

Wow, I didn't expect the hinting process to be that complex. Everything I threw in ttfautohint just worked. Thanks for the component introduction. 🙂

Your build does look much better:

But now the "v" looks more dominant than the "r". Like these glyphs have different x-heights. Which they don't... Quite a task. Hinting options.

[rsms]

Can you share how you reproduce the above? I’m unable to repro that rendering on Windows 10.

[johannschopplich]

It seems that Thunderbird 60.0b11 (which I used to test) renderes hinted TTFs different. I retested in MS Office Word and Inter UI renders fairly fine even in larger sizes.

[rsms]

Interesting. It seems it may be an issue with Thunderbird. There are at least two open issues related to ClearType text rendering. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1374225

If it looks good on Windows (apps on Windows that use the OSes text rendering) I'm going to call it and close tihis ticket. Let me know if that is not the case and we can reopen this and investigate rendering on Windows' :–)

[johannschopplich]

Sounds like a plan. Thanks for the thorough research. Looking forward to RC2 now. 😄

[rsms]

RC2 should be released tomorrow.

[rsms]

RC 2 has been released and should fix this issue.
https://github.com/rsms/inter/releases/tag/v3.0-rc2