Re: [Freetype] Autohinting?

[Vadim Plessky]

On Wednesday 07 August 2002 8:32 pm, George Williams wrote:
|
|  >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.
|
|  It is in the pipeline, but it's going very slowly. It's a seperate program
|  from PfaEdit, and I keep getting distracted from it to work on PfaEdit
|  itself. Eventually it will get there...

George, 

do you have some alpha/beta code for this separate program?
It would be interesting to take a look on it.
(I prefer working beta to screenshots :-)

BTW: As 
a) OpenType fonts can contain PostScript Type1 outlines, and PostScript 
hinting, and 
b) OpenType fonts are supported by Adobe Type Manager 4.1 (Windows) and 
Windows 2000/XP, 
--> *skipping* TrueType native hinting (Bytecodes) sounds as a good idea to 
me.

All said above is valid if we think of Windows users support, which can be the 
case in Windows->Linux migration path as well.
OpenType fonts (tested only fonts generated by PfaEdit so far) can be rendered 
by current FreeType, and rendered on Linux quite well (tested with 
KDE3/KOffice, AA enabled, works great)

If you don't want to support Windows users/Windows apps - I do not think you 
need TrueType fonts and Bytecodes, so there is no reason to spend too much 
time on Bytecode-based font hinting.

What I really would like to see in PfaEdit is capability to import all 
TrueType hints (bytecodes) "as is", and export TrueType font file with 
exactly those hints.
Than at least you can import some TTF font with complicated hinting, export it 
again and compare rendering quality (to be sure that all original information 
is preserved)
Besides, you can estimate than *in numbers* how complicated TrueType hinting 
(number of OpCodes per glyph), and compare that to PS hinting.

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Cheers,
-- 

Vadim Plessky
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