the horizontal advance of hinted charstrings gets lost when the CFF hinting is stripped with '--no-hinting' option, as noted by @miguelsousa here: https://github.com/behdad/fonttools/issues/343#issuecomment-156234918 The reason is T2CharString objects only get assigned a 'witdh' attribute after their 'draw' method is called. The subsetter's 'drop_hints' function attempts to insert the width back at the beginning of the de-hinted charstring's program, but can do that only if the charstring does have a 'width' attribute: https://github.com/behdad/fonttools/blob/master/Lib/fontTools/subset/__init__.py#L1908