RE: [Devel] Some food for thought (Might be?)

[Turner David]

Hello,

> 
> I have been following Freetype devel list lately since the 
> work on autohinter started. As posted on mailing list before, akito and 
> Firefly 
> have made patches to change autohinter so that it works much better on CJK 
> fonts. 
> I also noticed David has suggested another version of hinter name as 
> 'autofit' now 
> available in CVS directory /freetype2/src/autofit
> 
Yes, this works is not finished, unfortunately, though it's getting close :-(

> I am not familiar with autohinting algorithm, but I noticed 
> that recently freedesktop.org has an article named "Open Source Desktop 
> Technology Road Map", by Jim Gettys from HP Labs.
> 
> In particular from the "Font" section of that article:
> 
> http://freedesktop.org/~jg/roadmap.html#mozTocId308967
> 
> which has a few comments on font design and hinting. I don't 
> know if autohinter has addressed his points but there's a link to John 
> Hobby's 
> research paper on related topic:
> 
> http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/hobby/pubs.html
> 
> Not sure if they are actually useful just in case to post 
> here as a reminder.
> 

Well, I've already discussed Hobby's paper, but here's a short
summary:

  - the algorithm cannot work very well in real-time for at
    least two reasons:

      * it needs to scan all glyphs in the font to extract
        meaningful metrics.

      * the computation require very high accuracy, are _very_
        slow

  - the output is not that good, and I don't see how you could
    adapt the algorithm to the anti-aliased case.

> BTW, how's the status of autofit currently? Is it usable yet?
> 
Still in progress. I unfortunately lack the time to complete it
for the moment. You can however study the current code since it's
pretty close to what will be in the final release.

Regards,

- David Turner
- The FreeType Project  (www.freetype.org)

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