re “Recomponentization” – there’s seems to be an ‘issue’ in later osx’s where referenced components fail to be rendered properly if the component is comprised of another component. An example would be to create a dieresis from two periods, and then to reference the dieresis in ü, ë, ä etc etc. The result would be the ‘periods’ of the dieresis would get placed on the baseline, or just randomly it seems. So, a good rule seems to be to not create components from other components. I would love to know why this is the case, if you have any ideas.

The Fontforge user interface have support for TTF-style components in fonts made with cubic bezier curves. When a font is exported as Opentype-CFF, it generates subroutines (it also seek out other parts of the glyphs that can be compressed and speeded up using subroutines), when exported as Opentype-TTF, it generates TTF-components (it even finds components that is not made with the component-feature, e.g. if an accent is identical in several glyphs and in the accent glyph, or a character is identical in several accented glyphs). I haven’t used propriety font editors in ages (since 1996, I think), but I would be surprised if they don’t all have similar features. Also, being able to have only one version of a glyph component (like an accent) that change automagically in all glyphs that use it, makes it much easier to create glyphs. Are you sure you have to do “recomponentization” by hand (or however you do it)?

Fontforge also support layers with different kinds of splines. With a bit of scripting, I think that could simplify some of your problems (redo the hard to convert part of a glyph by hand in a separate quadratic layer, then use a script to merge (and convert) the layers). Most open source projects (using FontForge) seem to do most of the work (at least the creative part), using spiro-curves nowadays, which isn’t like bezier curves at all.

For bringing characters from Illustrator into FontLab, there are some step-by-step descriptions out there, I believe. You could try searching on typophile.com (their built-in search does not work so well, use a search engine).

If you are new to fonts, I’d suggest working with PostScript-based fonts, which use the same type of curves as Illustrator, are easier to edit, and easier to hint. You could even try completely unhinted PS-based fonts, which often look quite good as webfonts.

Is it necessary to make hinting to my web font?
finally, I wish you can write more about hinting in the near future

Best

Jason: Yes, FontForge has some very powerful functions but it does not seem to be particularly popular for actual type design work, at least among the designers I know. Excellent for post-processing, though.

Kenneth: Not sure what you mean. The things outlined in this article are done by us at Typekit for fonts we host – you don’t need to do these optimizations yourself.

J F Porchez: Thanks, that’s very interesting. I didn’t know of Sabon Next as a specific example. I can imagine that it was particularly tricky to convert because of the refined curves.