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

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le Mar 24 juillet 2012 23:17, Michael Cronenworth a écrit :

> It also turns every font into a blurry mess. This is not a subjective
> opinion. Run the listed command on the Feature Page for DejaVu and
> Liberation fonts (two of the biggest free fonts). With the current
> free-type environment you have crisp, clean fonts. Enable auto-hinting
> and every character becomes blurred including a simple exclamation mark
> that is a single line of pixels.

What you call crisp other call distorted windows-like rendering (even
Apple does not do it that way, their rendering is closer to freetype
autohinting)

The change that disabled autohinting for any font with hinting traces was
done without even checking our fonts worked well with it (most fonts have
some hint traces because most font authors have experimented with them or
copied a few glyphs from hinted fonts. That does not mean the hints are
complete or usable for the font as a whole)

Current in-the-wild font hints are bad enough Werner Lemberg could raise
funds to write a windows-oriented executable that does nothing but embed
freetype autohinter results in font files (so windows users get the
benefit of freetype autohinting)

http://www.freetype.org/ttfautohint/

If you look at the Google font directory logs Google is using this tool to
add hints to its own files.

Using font file hints should definitely be an opt-in (enable in the
fontconfig snippet associated with a particular font family, after
checking the hints are actually better than autohinting) not an opt-out.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot