[1 mod] Hinting: Italic 'sis', Inconsistent spacing at 11pt

[adoa]

Rendered in 11pt Italic

Sample Glyphs:

sis

Description:

It seems to me, that sometimes there is a pixel too much space before the Latin lowercase ‘s’ in italic style. This seems to depend on the letter that precedes the ‘s’.
I first noticed this in the combination with ‘i’ as in “is”. It does not seem, however, to be a problem of the ‘i’.

UA String:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; de; rv:1.9.2.10) Gecko/20100915 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6.10

[adoa (adoa)]

Automatic Screenshot

[adoa (adoa)]

Update: There seem to be more spacing problems at italic 11pt. Please take a look at “hia” at the end of “Philadelphia”.
There are some other letters that have problems with the spacing in this screen shot: “ow” in “town” and “ca” in “scared”.

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

adoa: please could you post the settings that are selected in System->Preferences->Appearance->Fonts->[Details...]

This is so that we can work out what level of Hinting is in use and therefore whether it needs to be adjusted in the manually-hinted outlines.

[adoa (adoa)]

After your post I have been playing around with my settings and looked at the effect on the font in Firefox. There was none. I have no idea whether Firefox uses the font settings of gnome at all... so I restored my previous settings:

• 96 dots per inch – This is the default value. Should I change this to a value that somehow corresponds to my monitor?
• subpixel smoothing
• full hinting – does this correspond to the manually-hinted outlines or is this an automatically generated hinting?
• subpixel order: RGB – I think this is correct for my notebook display

adoa

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

Yes, at 11 pt * 96 dpi / 72 pt => 15 pixels-per-em in this case, and "Full Hinting" means that purely the manual hint set from the font is being used.

I think for "Philadelphia" there isn't enough slant on the 'a' in the screenshot shown; normally the uprights on the lower case letters have moved across 2 pixels by the x-height, but the 'a' is only moving across 1 pixel, giving it the appearance of being less italic. Please can you file this issue separately and then link back to the screenshots above.