Partially hinted fonts

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le Sam 2 avril 2011 02:18, Kevin Kofler a écrit :
>
> Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
>> To be honest, I don't fully agree with upstream.  Autohinter and bytecode
>> *can* be used together.  The results won't be optimal, but much better
>> than the current output.  Maybe someone can bring up the multi-script font
>> use case with upstream and convince them to reconsider.
>
> Well, I think somebody would need to come up with a patch, too.
>
> The current Freetype code is such that the decision whether to autohint is
> taken very early, much before the glyph is even loaded at all. So there are
> also technical obstacles to implementing per-glyph fallback.
>
> Unlike upstream, I do think that the fallback should be per glyph, not per
> font, but I don't know how to implement this.

IMHO, Fedora should use the hinter setting most favourable to the improvement
of FLOSS fonts. That's what Fedora mission *is*.

Activating bytecode is clearly a win for fully hinted small ASCII fonts and or
proprietary fonts. Because hinting (done properly) is hard, and FLOSS requires
releasing early, and often, instead of sitting on a font till its is
"complete", I suspect the current bytecode activation will only lead to :
1. stripping of partial hints from existing fonts (killing work and making
sure full hinting will never happen)
2. use of autohinting in font editors (for a result that can be worse than
freetype's autohinter, not sure if that permits manual hinting later or not)

Thus I tend to think like Behdad its current activation is a mistake. However
I don't create fonts myself, therefore I'd like to know what the opinion of
the people managing big FLOSS projects (Dejavu, Linux Libertine, etc) is on
this situation. And I'd defer to *their* opinion. The current change has
clearly been done just because "OMG a patent has expired it must enable good
stuff" and "Arial wants bytecode" not any serious analysis of what it meant
from a FLOSS POW (some of the same people were staunch supporters of Luxi,
despite its legal status)

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot