[3 mod] Hinting: ji tittles and üäö umlauts not aligned/consistent

[adoa]

Rendered in 13pt Regular

Sample Glyphs:

äöüij

Description:

The Umlauts on the lowercase letters ü (U+00FC) , ä (U+00E4), ö (U+00F6) harmonize to the points above i and j for hardly any font-size smaller than 40. For _very_ big font-sizes they become more and more identical, so I think this behavior was not intended.

What irritated me the most: For small font sizes the umlauts are not always centered above the letters, sometimes they are shifted to the left, sometimes they are shifted to the right. That depends on the actual font size. Additionally the points do not look the same as the points above i and j for small font sizes, the level is different, too. I suppose they are hinted differently or Firefox interprets the hinting differently because of some unexpected reason.

For regular font weight this is most striking. But I think, for bold or italic there are some differences, too.

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

Proposed solution:
  1. Go through all weights
  2. Ensure that the hints for both tittles and umlauts tend to a circular form
  3. Ensure that the hints for both tittles and umlauts are aligned at all PPEMs

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

I've reproduce this now:

What's really interesting is that the umlauts very quickly become circular at slightly larger hinted sizes, whereas the tittles on the ji stay square a very long way up.