On Fri, Sep 03, 2010 at 08:56:22PM +0200, hiro wrote:
Admittedly, the newer auto-hinters do a decent job of this these days

The freetype autohinter?
http://freetype.sourceforge.net/autohinting/hinter.html#screenshots
Perhaps this is outdated, but it looks horrible to me.

It depends on the font, but I believe it's gotten better since that screenshot was taken.

Hinting patents have expired and any distribution should now be able
to include the proper bytecode interpreter.

I agree. My point was that the (simple) bytecode interperater is not a bad thing. It's just the simplest way for font designers to control how vector fonts are rasterized on low-resolution media or in very small sizes. The auto-hinted fonts tend to look much less like their printed counterparts than the designer hinted fonts.

Before the bytecode interperater was introduced, the practice was to use bitmap fonts for small glyph sizes and low resolution displays, even for vector fonts, and I'm glad to see the end of that.

--
Kris Maglione

Don't surrender your loneliness / So quickly.  / Let it cut more
deeply.  / Let it ferment and season you / As few human / Or even
divine ingredients can.
        --Hafez


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