Re: hinting in True Type fonts

[Tom Kacvinsky]

Hi,

>
> >Does anyone her know of a good program for making human readable code
> >from hint instructions in True Type fonts?  It does not matter if the
> >tool is Windows, Macintosh, or UNIX based.
> 
> TTX can disassemble instructions, but only to a *very* low level. It's
> hardly useful. Still, if you want to play (ttDump.py is the program you
> want):
>   http://www.petr.nl/just/FontTools.tar.gz
> (it's written in Python, and you might need to install a bunch of
> additional stuff for it to run.)
>

Working on getting Python installed right now...  By the way, when is
the next update for the stand alone Macintosh version of TTX due?  I
noticed some Macintosh specific stuff in the the above tarball; I
assume it is for running FontTools with Mac Python?

> 
> >I have FontLab, Fontographer, and VTT.  Unfortunately, no one of these
> >programs show existant hint instructions; they only show instructions
> >that are added after the font is opened and edited.
> >
> >I am attempting to learn something about TT hinting for a project I am
> >working on, and looking at good examples is one way of learning a lot
> >about hinting.
> 
> VTT uses it's own higher level language, which is compiled to TT bytecode.
> It's is not always possible to reverse that process. And that's a very
> general thing, just like it's hardly possible to turn machine code into
> useable C code.
>

Yeah, I see what you mean.  Too bad TT hints aren't as nice as T1 hints.
Oh well, there are other trade offs...

Thanks for the response,

Tom