Re: What does the light hinting option actually do?

[Tatsuyuki Ishi]

> It is possible to activate stem darkening while in auto-hinting mode.
> This feature is (still) missing in the TrueType engine.

Yeah, makes sense.

> What is the background of your question?

Just playing around with various knobs to find the most pleasing font
rendering configuration.

In particular I'm using the IBM Plex family which comes with manual
hinting. Using full hinting gives slightly better controlled shapes,
but I think I'm going back to light autohinter because full hinting
causes abrupt jumps in stem width when changing the font size.
Not sure if v40 actually ignores all horizontal hinting too; the
abrupt jumps suggest that it's snapping the stem width for vertical
stems.

By the way I think what `FT_LOAD_TARGET_LIGHT` actually means right
now seems to be a mess. It's unlikely that this is going to change
soon as we can't change the current behavior, but maybe the "On
(s)light hinting" blog post can be updated to reflect how the TrueType
and CFF engine behaves today. (With FT_LOAD_TARGET_NORMAL, the
TrueType engine uses the vertical-only v40 engine if available, while
the CFF engine seems to behave the same as when FT_LOAD_TARGET_LIGHT
is specified.)

Tatsuyuki