"resolving" connections automatically

[Ray Larabie]

It's hard to describe this problem without an example but it's something comes up when making italics and obliques.

First make a small box with rounded corners
make a square about 100 units high
transform: bold, 30,30 make round corners.
Make proper connections using contour/connections

So now you've got a small rounded box with proper "triangle" conenctions

slant 13 degrees

double click the connections twice. See that "twitch" on some connections? That's what I'm trying to describe.

Doing the twitch before optimizing italics can produce different results than not doing the twitch.
Moving the bezier handles before doing the twitch has a different effect as well
When creating ultralight italic styles, that little twitch is very important. I currently have to do 32 clicks (16 double clicks) when I slant an ultralight rounded box. I've been doing this for years and never thought about it much but I was wondering if there's a way to automate the process.

[PabloImpallari]

Hi Ray:
Have you seen the "RMX Slanter" macro by Tim Ahrens?
http://www.remix-tools.com/

Maybe it helps.
Pablo

[Ray Larabie]

That's not the problem. It's getting the triangle connections to "resolve" their curve without clicking them. It happens with rotating, interpolation, changing weight, generating curves from sketch mode and even just simple scaling. FontLab doesn't resolve these triangle connections. It assigns a triangle point but there's no automatic way to force FontLab to recalculate the curve. This is a major problem when making thing fonts with small round details.

Another problem occurs when converting to TrueType curves. A traingle point connection, unresolved, sometimes converts poorly into TT curves. The control point will be places in a way which causes ugly kinks in the line.

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