David and Werner both have commented that the Postscript hinter has a lot of
bugs, but is unlikely to be fixed anytime soon, due to a lack of time.  I've
looked at the code myself, and it is reasonably complicated.

However, the auto-fitter code is both reasonably new and well-tuned.  From
my understanding of how the auto-fitter works, it essentially finds
Postscript-style hints for a font, and then adjusts the glyph shapes
according to these hints.  The second part is just what the Postscript
hinter does; would it be possible to pass the Postscript hints from a Type 1
or CFF-flavored OTF font to the hinting part of the auto-fitter?  I have
tried using the auto-fitter, reasonably successfully, on CFF fonts, but the
main problem is that not all places to hint are detected, and global
parameters (like offshoots) are often calculated differently.  Since the CFF
font already has this information, it seems the auto-fitter shouldn't need
to re-figure it out.

I don't know how difficult what I'm proposing is, but it might be a way to
reduce the size of the code base and the amount of effort maintaining, while
still getting good results for CFF fonts.  Thanks for considering it!

Best wishes,
Stephen
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