If you've ever had a blown print from your vector drawing program, there's an excellent chance that you or your app didn't obey the Winding Path Rule, an Adobe convention for PostScript printers. Winding Path also applies to typefaces, so if you have a font that looks filled-in and just plain wrong and especially if you design fonts, read on:
Winding Path Rule states that the fill to a closed curve must go to the right of the outline. Take a look at my pathetic example below. Now, a character that has a hole in it, like the letter "O", has to have that path going in the opposite direction as the outer path. When you draw characters, pay attention to the direction of the curve. Xara Xtreme and CorelDraw don't care about this rule, but Microsoft Expression Graphic Designer (formerly Expression) and Adobe Illustrator both offer path direction tools for "compound paths". Use a node or path selection tool in combination with the reverse curve direction feature if you have paths going in the wrong way (this can also be corrected in FontLab
http://fontlab.com/Font-tools/FontLab-Studio/).
What happens if characters have paths going in the wrong direction? Most of the time, nothing, but 3D applications such as XARA 3D are very sensitive to path direction. In the bottom illustration, the paths to this typeface are going in the wrong direction, and the resulting line of text looks like an eggshell having a bad hair day. Keep those directions going the proper way in your fonts, and you will be able to sell them for more money!
My Best,
Gare
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