Uneven word alignment

[zephster]

Hi! Love the font, but this issue has been bugging me for a long time.

The alignment of bolded words seems to differ than non-bold words, and this only seems to happen on font sizes <= 10. Here's an example, in SublimeText 3:

Font size <=10:
Font size >=11:
(thead vs theads, just as an example)

Could this be caused by something in SublimeText, or is it an issue with the Hack font itself?
Thanks!

[chrissimpkins]

Thanks for the report Brandon. This is not something that I’ve come across before. What platform are you on and are you using the current release of the Hack fonts?

[zephster]

Windows 7 (Win10 at home, issue exists there as well), and I'm using the current release.

[chrissimpkins]

Thank you. What sizes below 10 have you tried?

[zephster]

<=4: - appears even, but too small to use
5-10: - appears uneven

=11: - appears even, but too large to use (in my opinion)

[chrissimpkins]

Thank you very much. I am going to be doing some work with the hinting this weekend and will have a look. We shouldn't be causing a shift off of the baseline with the hinting but let me check it to confirm. What version of Sublime Text 3 are you using? I believe that there was a new release in the last month or two. I will check their release notes as well. I don't think the problem lies with ST (and we can confirm if you would be willing to try it in another editor).

[zephster]

I'm using version 3107, but the issue's been present in every previous version I've used.

I installed Atom and tried it there, and the text does not appear to ever be un-aligned, at any font size.

However, I think that's just because Atom is not bolding the tag like ST3 does.

Thanks for looking into it, it's much appreciated.

[chrissimpkins]

That is helpful. Thank you!

[chrissimpkins]

I can verify that the hinted bold glyphs are properly aligned on the baseline (the bottom horizontal black line) across 8 - 14 ppem (and tested below that to 6 ppem however not shown in this animated gif):

and this animation shows alternate bold glyph displays with and without hints:

This is the case for the regular set too. From what I can tell, there should not be a pixel difference in height between the glyphs in these two sets. I'm not certain what is causing this issue. Possible to try this in another editor with a syntax highlighter that includes bold elements to see if this is a Sublime Text or syntax highlighter specific issue?

[zephster]

In Atom, I tried out a few different color schemes and manually edited them to have some bold tags. The issue didn't seem to happen, at any font size, for any color scheme.

In Sublime, the issue's present for every color scheme, at the previously discussed font sizes.

I'm going to install a few more editors/IDEs and see what happens.

Is there any other info I can provide for you?
Thanks for the help!

[chrissimpkins]

Interesting. I don’t know why it is happening in ST and not in Atom. I reviewed the changelog for the most recent ST 3 update and it appears that they made changes to their syntax highlighter approach; however, you say that this occurred in previous versions. Might be worth a note on the ST forums to see if anyone on that side of the issue has any thoughts. Post in here when you have a chance to try the other editors so that we know if this seems to be a problem elsewhere. Thanks much!

[zephster]

I made a post on the ST forums here.

I did some more testing:
Win10 VM, Eclipse, seemingly no alignment issues.
Win10 VM, standalone ST 2.0.2, no packages installed: no alignment issues.
Win10 VM, standalone ST3 build 3107 (the latest), no packages installed: no alignment issues.
Win7, standalone ST3 build 3107, no packages installed: alignment issues.

I also took the entire standalone 3107 directory from Win10 VM, which had no alignment issues, transferred everything to the host (Win7), and had alignment issues.

I'll try a fresh (standalone, no packages) setup when I get home, where I have Win10 as the native OS. The installed version of ST3 on my home computer also has the alignment issues, so I am assuming a fresh download will also suffer from this problem. I'll comment later when I find out for sure.

edit: Tested on my home computer, alignment issue present.

[chrissimpkins]

So it sounds like we can currently determine that this is an editor dependent issue (in Sublime Text) and that it occurs in native Win 7 and Win 10 OS's with the Sublime Text 3 editor. Interestingly, it does not occur in VM's with either ST 2 or 3.

One of the responders in your ST forum thread suggested that there have been other reports of a similar problem with other fonts. Perhaps explore this in a bit more detail? If you come up with more information we would be very interested to hear about it. I don't know that there is anything at the moment that I can offer to solve it but we should leave this issue report open for others who come across a similar problem.