Re: [ft-devel] ttfautohint: Milestone reached!

[Werner LEMBERG]

[Vern, I take the liberty to answer on the list also.]

> That's very interesting and gives some pretty good results.  If
> no-one else has done so i am happy to run some specimen tests &
> produce screenshots.

This would be great!  Please wait a few days until I've fixed the
problem with composite glyphs (I'm nearly done, and the solution was
much easier than expected); I'll then send another mail to the list.

> Are there plans with ttfautohint to give the user any abilities to
> vary/manipulate hinting parameters?

Yes.  However, I need input from experienced designers like you who
tell me what shall be configurable.  The first parameter to be added
is the size range covered by hinting.  For the moment, it is fixed to
8<=ppem<=1000.  Another one is whether the original font's outline
shall be used, or whether the font's original hinting shall be applied
(at the font units level, which means 2048 ppem for most TrueType
fonts).  Some fonts like ArialMT *always* apply hints to some
composite glyphs to shift one or more subglyphs.  Note that the latter
option will probably take some time to implement.

Finally, there is the problem of glyphs which can't be addressed with
a cmap directly, like small caps which are activated by an OpenType
feature.  Similar to FreeType's autohinter, such glyphs don't get any
special consideration and are treated by the default hinting module
(in FreeType this is the `cjk' module currently, and in ttfautohint it
can be either `dummy' or `latin', to be controlled by another
yet-to-be-written configuration option :-).  This is quite a generic
problem and needs separate attention; for the moment it is beyond my
work on ttfautohint.

So please comment and make suggestions!


    Werner