> It is possible to activate stem darkening while in auto-hinting mode. > This feature is (still) missing in the TrueType engine.
Yeah, makes sense. > What is the background of your question? Just playing around with various knobs to find the most pleasing font rendering configuration. In particular I'm using the IBM Plex family which comes with manual hinting. Using full hinting gives slightly better controlled shapes, but I think I'm going back to light autohinter because full hinting causes abrupt jumps in stem width when changing the font size. Not sure if v40 actually ignores all horizontal hinting too; the abrupt jumps suggest that it's snapping the stem width for vertical stems. By the way I think what `FT_LOAD_TARGET_LIGHT` actually means right now seems to be a mess. It's unlikely that this is going to change soon as we can't change the current behavior, but maybe the "On (s)light hinting" blog post can be updated to reflect how the TrueType and CFF engine behaves today. (With FT_LOAD_TARGET_NORMAL, the TrueType engine uses the vertical-only v40 engine if available, while the CFF engine seems to behave the same as when FT_LOAD_TARGET_LIGHT is specified.) Tatsuyuki