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

[Peter Jones]

On 07/25/2012 10:21 AM, Tomasz Torcz wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 25, 2012 at 04:13:54PM +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
>>
>> 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)
> 
>   Which is which?  There are some example here: 
> http://tagoh.fedorapeople.org/tmp/hints/
>  *-autohint variants are clearly blurred, while -*hintfull are eligible.
> 

The "eligible" bits are the windows-like rendering AIUI.

Nicolas's point is that evaluating these results, despite Michael's statement
to the contrary, is highly subjective. To me your results look like this:

DejaVuSans:
10 pts - pretty much both terrible, but for completely opposite reasons!
11-16 pts - bizarrely thin lines on the -hintful ones, basically okay on
            -autohint.  All readable, but some are just ugly.
17 pts - strange and uncomfortable variances in line thickness on -hintful
         but basically okay on -autohint
18-25 pts -  still some thickness issues but mostly okay on -hintful, but
             better on -autohint,
26 pts - weirdly bold on -hintful, normal looking on -autohint

The liberation screenshots follow much the same way, except the 17 pts
one is lumped in with 11-16.

But obviously some people have different opinions, and seem to prefer the
blockiness of -hintful to the blur of -autohint.

-- 
        Peter