> I have noticed that several of the non-Latin fonts we ship in Fedora contain
> partial hinting information, usually not covering (or covering only very
> poorly) the intended target alphabet(s) of the fonts.
It is a common practice in so-called CJK regions.
> This is a problem because the version of Freetype in Fedora 15 will see that
> there is some hinting bytecode and try to use the bytecode interpreter
> rather than the autohinter on the entire font. If the relevant characters
> are then not actually hinted, those characters will be entirely unhinted,
> looking blurry.
Hmm. I didn't noticed it.
It is really a big problem. With very few exceptions, almost all CJK
fonts are *partically* hinted. (I'm not familiar with fonts for other
scripts, but I guess there are some more with similar situations.)
That means most of the CJK fonts will not work well in Fedora.
> According to Freetype upstream, you should remove all hinting bytecode from
> the fonts if it's not complete.
> Please go through your fonts, especially non-Latin fonts, looking for
> hinting bytecode, and if it isn't anywhere near complete, please remove it
> from the font.
It may be acceptable for a short term workaround, but I don't think it
is an appropriate solution. We could remove those partial hints from
all the Fedora distributed fonts, but we have no control over other
fonts; there are many free or commercial CJK fonts other than those
packaged in Fedora, that are partially hinted. If we go you-should-
remove-all-partial-hints-if-you-want-to- use-it-on-Fedora direction,
Fedora users will be effectively unable to use those fonts, that IMHO
is not a good idea.
What happens if I propose Fedora to simply exclude those bytecode
support in Fedora distribution of FreeType, as in the past?