skef

This doesn't need to happen.

Looking at this I'm wondering what the specific problem is. If `buildmasterotfs` works differently depending on whether there is a processedlayer or not, that suggests that it uses the processedlayer...

This change would be equivalent to saying that you can't hint the glyphs in a variable font before building it. So we should be sure that's OK and not needed...

Maybe we can add a switch that says to use the processed layer but default to the foreground, which should take care of 99% of the problem assuming people don't...

The only benefit of hinting "before" rather than "after" is that you can do it once and then rebuild multiple times. So there isn't much benefit to hinting in the...

I'll update this and assign @kaydeearts soon

Thanks, that's helpful. It sounds like it would be fairly low-effort to start passing it through when there's no axis subsetting and when RETAIN_GIDS is specified.

Overlap removal in AFDKO (either that built into tx or the BooleanOperation systems available at the Python level) currently discards hints. The stem information, including counter hints, are specified at...

Incidentally there's a reasonably efficient implementation of that spline association in Python [here](https://github.com/adobe-type-tools/psautohint/blob/9da6b57c9bee972c99b605419771b78f9ddfea57/python/psautohint/glyphData.py#L1289). The trickiest problem here may be choosing the overlap removal algorithm. There are implementations in AFDKO's tx,...

Can you `tx` dump the hinted glyphs and post the output here? Or possibly do that for just the most affected bar? (Maybe also including the output for the unhinted...