Re: Lohit Tamil with Embolden transformation

2011/11/28 Santhosh Thottingal <sthottingal(a)wikimedia.org&gt;

>  Hi,
>
>  I spent some amount of time today on learning about hinting and its
>  behavior, played with fontforge, compared Lohit Tamil with other Tamil
>  and Malayalam fonts which is having not so bad rendering in windows.
>
>  Autohinting is not giving expected results for Indic fonts, since they
>  are yet to write algorithms for that-
>  http://www.freetype.org/ttfautohint/
>  I checked with Hiran about the possibility of Manual Hinting. He told
>  me that , that requires advanced skills in typography and he never
>  seen it anybody done for Indic fonts except a typographers work for
>  Sinhala.
>  
Yes, manual hinting is pain. It takes lots of time.

We need to do it for each character and for each size i.e. 8pt, 10pt, 12pt.

4-5 bugs on liberation fonts hinting is pending from long time, so i need
to dig it some time.


>  If we are using upstream Lohit, I understand that we cannot get good
>  results. Lohit family fonts are not well tested for Windows
>  too(Pravin, Correct me if I am wrong).
>  
Yes, windows was never high priority for lohit, but some people use it for
Windows as well though i have not heard anything regarding Lohit Tamil yet.



>  By studying the behavior of other fonts, I have one solution with me,
>  I did an Embolden Transformation on font by 25
>  units(http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/Styles.html) and I see that the
>  hinting problem is disappeared and font is more good for reading. The
>  font is more dark now.
>  
Yeah, we need Bold font for each script in Lohit upstream. see bug for
Devanagari https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=648350

But auto bold will not work perfectly, we need some manual intervention by
font designer to make it consistent with Regular Lohit fonts.



>  Srikanth, Pravin, please confirm this by the screenshots attached. let
>  me know if there is any improvement.
>  
Definitely image looks better that earlier broken thing.  Let me know once
you applied it.

Regards,
Pravin Satpute