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

[Kevin Kofler]

Akira TAGOH wrote:
> I admit simply enabling force-auto-hinting isn't enough. we definitely
> need to optimize a lot to make it more better.

The FreeType autohinter has been developed for years, leading to what we 
have now. It is totally unreasonable to expect to be able to "optimize" it 
in the time frame of a single release.

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.

> in fact there are the case auto-hinting gives much better than
> BCI-hinting.

Those are broken fonts (they probably ship hinting information only for 
selected glyphs and leave the others entirely unhinted), and we should force 
autohinting manually for those fonts.

> that may implies there may be more cases to be improved. as you guys are
> looking at your monitor daily-basis, if something goes wrong, it's easy to
> realize what's improved and what's worse. isn't this feature a good idea
> to get such feedback?

NO!

We have had autohinting by default for years, back when the BCI was 
patented. It has NOT lead to the kind of improvements you seem to be 
expecting, and in fact it was common practice to rebuild FreeType with the 
BCI enabled (or use the freetype-freeworld package which did that; these 
days, the only remaining difference between freetype and freetype-freeworld 
is subpixel rendering). Why should it work any better now?

The BCI patent has finally expired, we have finally been able to enable the 
BCI in Fedora, and now you propose to move back. This is not a constructive 
proposal.

> If there are any commonly applicable rules, it should be done in the
> system wide way, I mean in fontconfig. otherwise need to do it in the
> specific way, in the fonts packages.

Doing it per font is the right solution if individual fonts don't work 
properly with the BCI. Normally, fonts which provide hinting bytecode expect 
it to be used! (And for those which don't provide any hinting bytecode, 
FreeType already automatically falls back to autohinting. I personally 
ensured this.)

        Kevin Kofler