Hi! Vernon Adams has been doing some research into improving rendering without an autohinter, but by adjusting various TTF "flags" that effect rendering, and this email is based on his discussion with me so full credit to him:
Vern and I were discussing this, and he said that an autohinter is definitely a bonus but the crucial things are the main vertical hints, to steady the baseline/x height/cap height lines, and hinting the interletter spaces too. Perhaps autohinters today attempt too much and then fail overall, and quality could be improved by a new approach. Perhaps the conventional wisdom on what is considered 'best practice' for hinting relates too much to the original Truetype Specs, that targeted much smaller, low-colour OS & screens than what we are generally dealing with today. Anti-aliasing and 'smoothing' are much more an active part of hint-based OS's & screens now. The apparent rendering difference between OT and TT on Windows GDI is maybe part of that. A new ftdemo tool that allows setting gasp tables, anti aliasing, metrics, vertical metrics etc would help a lot. What would be very cool is an autohinter that combines with an auto-spacer, because it seems that the two are interlinked. Also, clear guidelines about how to design outlines to fit the pixel grid would help too - see Vern's latest blog on designing Candal - http://code.newtypography.co.uk/ - it seems stem widths with a factor of 2 seem the way, 32, 64, 128, etc. Werner, when will the infinality changesets be merged? That is an interesting development environment for web fonts since it allows switching of screen rendering modes on the fly. (Infinality is a patched version of Freetype that gives enhanced font rasterisation, and the ability to fine tune things since you can create 'render profiles' and switch font rendering to/from 'Apple' or 'Windows 7' etc. Very interesting for testing webfonts without needing to swap platforms! Vern will soon post about it on his blog with screenshots :-) -- Cheers Dave _______________________________________________ Freetype mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freetype
