[Devel] pmingliu.ttf and hints

[Alexander Gelfenbain]

I've been playing with freetype and pmingliyu.ttf font from Win2K.
The remarkable thing is that in that font hints are used to alter 
shapes of individual components of composite glyphs. Almost all chinese
glyphs are composite glyphs. With no hints applied composite glyphs
are not legible - they just look like a collection of random contours.

I checked some other CJK fonts shipped with Windows, MacOS X and
Solaris, and could not find any other example of using hints
to alter contours.

There consequences are:

1. Fonts designed in such a way are "protected" against use in
   TrueType scalers that do not use hints, like the license-free
   version of FreeType.

2. They can not be viewed in any scaler that performs auto-hinting
   instead of interpreting font hints either.

3. Print drivers are unable to stream these fonts to Type3 or Type1
   unless they fully rasterize them and apply hints or apply hints
   to the extracted outlines.

To repeat my experiment open pmingliy.ttf with ftview (I used resolution
of 200 ppem) and scroll to the glyph 2000.  Press 'h' to turn hinting
on and off.

Any comments?

AG
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