Re: [ft-devel] CFF: No hinting without vertical/horizontal hints?

[Nikolaus Waxweiler]

> I suppose this reduced form of hinting may be better than completely
> unhinted rendering. You'd be giving up hinting stems that are not in
> alignment zones, like the middle stem of 'E'. Also, you'd need some way
> to identify and locate the stems in an outline. In FreeType, there is a
> run-time auto-hinter that could do this. In normal CFF fonts, there is
> an auto-hinter that runs at font production time and records its output
> as a series of hstem and vstem declarations in the charstring. The
> production auto-hinter also recognizes and handles conflicting hints by
> partitioning complex glyphs into multiple hint zones, using the hintmask
> operator.

Thanks for the explanation :) So it may be better to check a CFF font
for hints and if none are found, invoke the autohinter. On my to do list :)