Comment 21 for bug 654192

I don't have the time to go through all the glyphs, but the fact that the top bowl stem is not horizontal is not a big deal to me (though, all of the glyphs where bowl visibly extends above the horizontal cross look weirder, like variants 5 and 6 in row 1, variant 3 in row 3), as long as it (seems to) join at where the horizontal stem is on the Н part. I guess I find the over-extending bowl much more of a problem with sans-serif fonts, because I don't seem to mind it at all in serif fonts (I notice it if I look hard for it, but I don't mind it). And also interestingly enough, the heavy bold Impact version (2nd row, final variant) doesn't bother me all that much at all.

So, I could agree that lack of proper (or any) hinting might be the main issue, but it also seems that the bowl that doesn't seamlessly connect into the horizontal crossbar is much more bothersome in sans-serif fonts.

As far as adoa's final question, the least important is the consistency of shapes of њ and ь: "ь" is not even used in Serbian (ever), so it's a moot point from the consistency stand-point. Consistency between Њ and Н, and hinting consistency are both equally important, imho. If some trade-offs need to be made at very small sizes, I'd guess that consistency between the letters should suffer first (especially for monospace, where width will have to change).

One can also make a case for consistency between bowls in Њ, њ and Љ, љ, considering they are similarly derived from Н, н, Л, л and they all do appear in Serbian.