Re: [Freetype] Autohinting?

[Holger Waechtler]

Hi Vadim,

since critic on and a wishlist for pfaedit might interest the author I 
cc'd him.

Vadim Plessky wrote:
> On Tuesday 06 August 2002 3:21 am, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> |  > |  That is very interesting.  How does one manually re-hint their
> |  > |  Type 1 fonts?  Do you need expensive Adobe software?  Is such
> |  > |  software available for Linux?  I imagine you are getting a grid
> |  > |  on your screen with the glyph shown with big pixels, and you can
> |  > |  move the dots around where you want then write that modified font
> |  > |  to a file?
> |  >
> |  > I use *old*, *very old* version of FontLab (http://www.fontlab.com)
> |  > They have ver.4.0 available at a moment, it costs around $400.  This
> |  > proigram is available for MS Windows, and, may be, for Macintosh.
> |  > It's not available for Linux.
> |
> |  pfaedit is free and supports automatic hinting also.  You should
> |  actually test whether it covers your needs.
>
> Thank for notice, I am happy that pfaedit matured.
> Problem is that when I started enhancing/editing fonts (1+ year ago), pfaedit 
> was just not ready. 

It still has a user interface that can get improved, using Gtk or Qt 
could make look and feel more familiar. I miss a raw list of Glyphs in 
font, it's sometimes hard to browse hundrets of pages to find a glyph or 
to look in the Unicode book for the right character code.

Some of the 'show glyph metrics in Glyph list'-features you can see in 
the DirectFB-example df_fonts could be a nice feature too -- they make 
it easy to spot bugs in fonts if you see all advances, bounding boxes, 
glyph origins on a single page.

A graphic list of all Kerning pairs would be nice too.

Another great feature would be a scalable automatically layouted known 
long text to test a number of Glyph combinations directly in the font 
editor.

The bytecode editor is still not available in the pfaedit realease I 
use, but I've seen some preliminary screenshots of it. So this feature 
seems to be in the pipeline.


> Also, by reading some fonts-related reviews, I found that different font 
> experts rated FontLab at *the only* font/typeface editor ready for 
> *professional* (read: production-quality) use.

Hmm, so called 'professionals' are sometimes a bit narrow-minded about 
their tools. Getting used to them requires lots of time and they are 
rarely willing to spend much time in testing alternatives.

Consider Gimp vs. Photoshop: almost every graphic designer you ask will 
tell you that Photoshop is the one-and-only program to create 
'professional' pixel art.

No matter if The Gimp has the same or more features, and they would 
never accept that Gimp is today better than the Photoshop they used just 
some years ago. They are just not willing to spend time in giving The 
Gimp a try or accept to miss features they learned to love in the last 
Photoshop release.


> It's fine with me that someone finds URW fonts of great quality, and edits 
> them in pfaedit, but I havce different opinion on this.
> Do you have any reference to font(s) created/enhanced in pfaedit?

George Williams created some fonts with pfaedit, you can download them 
from his homepage, download the source files from 
http://pfaedit.sourceforge.net/sfds/, load them in pfaedit and export 
them to TrueType.

Some of them he provides as .ttf's, too, but appearently they were 
exported using an old version of pfaedit and don't contain a valid 
Unicode mapping. If you reexport them everything is fine.


> How good they are, in your opinion?

They need work. Send George Patches against the source files if you 
improve them, we really need some better free fonts.

Holger