Quote:
Originally Posted by bartveld
Open a font and select all glyphs.
Tools -> Glyph transformer
If you want to thicken: choose Effects -> Bold
Now you start playing with the horizontal and vertical value. Usually, the horizontal value is higher than the vertical. It takes a lot of trial and error, because what the glyphs look like on your screen can be quite different from what an E-ink screen does with it.
If you want it bigger:
Glyph transformer -> Outlines -> Scale
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bartveld
Actually, this is where screen resolutions come into play. Once you've done this thickening and then you doubleclick on any glyph, you see a big pic of the glyph and you'll see it's as smooth as can be. It's the small previews which are ugly, but not necessarily on your reader. I've tried 4/2 with your Andada and it seems like a subtle but possibly effective thickening.
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You're correct about the different horizontal and vertical thickness of fonts but when thickening a font by 3-6 (which is usually more than enough) it is not necessary to use different horizontal and vertical values because the thickening is applied proportional. But there is nothing wrong to find optimal values but it is very time consuming.
I've converted some .otf fonts to .ttf and got pretty awful results when using FontLab Studio. Characters had different heights, overshoot and strange TT curves.
I tried all different FontLab TT settings but without a satisfying result.
I finally solved it by downloading the free TypeLight 3.2 and "recode" or "reconvert" my FontLab generated .ttf files. The final result was excellent.
In TypeLight:
- open the font file (.otf or .tff; in my case a .ttf file)
- Menu: Global > convert to TT curves
- Menu: Font > Metrics > Advanced > Calculate automatically > Ok > Ok
- Menu: Font > Font Options > include horizontal metrics (this step is probably not necessary.)
- save the font
This worked for me, uppercase and lowercase characters had the same height, the strange overshoots and strange curves were also gone.
BTW. ttf fonts seems to appear slightly darker (less grayish) than .otf fonts. Probably because of a different anti-aliasing algoritm. If your source font is a otf file try to convert it to ttf first and see how it looks on the reader. If the result is unsatisfying then start thickening the font.