Summary/Minutes from today's FESCo Meeting (2012-07-23)

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le Mer 25 juillet 2012 15:34, Kevin Kofler a écrit :

> It should also be quite expected that using the hinting information
> provided
> by the fonts will necessarily lead to better hinting than not using it.

Unfortunately, not. This is the classical "it's expensive and therefore
must be good" logic mistake. BCI is not necessarily good because it was
patented. BCI is better than no hinting at all, but that does not say
much.

Most of the fonts we use were developed with windows as a target (OSX
tends to attract closed paid-for fonts only) and windows does not do
autohinting.

So the hints present in most fonts are here to improve the rendering when
compared to no hinting at all. That in no way means they improve the
rendering when compared to a mature and well-optimised autohinter such as
the one used by freetype.

In fact ttfautohint development was funded in part by the Google Web Font
project, that works on the same set of FLOSS fonts as us, to provide
freetype autohinter-like results to windows users.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot