Re: Autohinting concerns [was: type1z vs. type1 charstrings processing.]

[Angus Duggan]

Werner LEMBERG writes:
>My interest is (of course) CJK fonts -- Adobe has introduced special
>hints (I don't know the names, sorry) to adjust distances and widths
>of horizontal stems for such CJK glyphs.  Example:

It sounds like you're talking about Type 2 charstring hintmasks and counter
masks.

>I don't know whether this is a global property, but I'm quite sure
>that the auto-hinter module will often fail to properly handle this
>without hints due to the complexity of CJK glyphs.

If the auto-hinter uses a constraint mechanism, it should be possible to
convert the hints into appropriate constraints while parsing the glyph.

I have seen examples of incorrect hints in both Type 1 and Type 2 charstring
hints. I think that automatically deriving the correct hints for CJK
characters would be rather hard, due to the large number of strokes, complex
relationships between them and artistic variation in shape. It seems that it
is much more important to keep the counters open in CJK than western fonts
(they are more likely to close because they are smaller anyway).

a.