[ft-devel] Announcing ttfautohint 1.8

[Werner LEMBERG]

ttfautohint 1.8.1 has been released.

The source tarball, statically-linked binaries for Win32 (TTY and GUI) and
OS X (TTY only) are available from

    http://savannah.nongnu.org/download/freetype/

or

    http://sourceforge.net/projects/freetype/files/ttfautohint/1.7

Instructions to build the GUI version on OS X can be found at

    http://freetype.org/ttfautohint/osx.html


Enjoy!


   Werner


PS: Downloads from savannah.nongnu.org will redirect to your nearest
    mirror site.  Files on mirrors may be subject to a replication
    delay of up to 24 hours.  In case of problems use
    http://download-mirror.savannah.gnu.org/releases/

PPS: Due to a bug in another package (which I can't control), Homebrew
     support is not yet available, cf.

       https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/pull/22321


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http://freetype.org/ttfautohint

This project provides a library which takes a TrueType font as the input,
remove its bytecode instructions (if any), and return a new font where all
glyphs are bytecode hinted using the information given by FreeType's
autohinting module.  The idea is to provide the excellent quality of the
autohinter on platforms which don't use FreeType.

The library has a single API function, `TTF_autohint'; see
`lib/ttfautohint.h' for a detailed description.  Note that the library
itself won't get installed currently.

A command-line interface to the library is the `ttfautohint' program; after
compilation and installation, say

  ttfautohint --help

for usage information, or say

  man ttfautohint

to read its manual page.

A GUI to the library is `ttfautohintGUI'; it uses the Qt4 framework.  The
compilation of this application can be disabled with the `--without-qt'
configuration option.


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Version 1.8.1 (2018-Jan-01)
---------------------------

  * Bug fix: The `configure` script couldn't recognize Qt 5.10.x.


Version 1.8 (2017-Dec-31)
-------------------------

  * A third, 'natural' stem width mode has been added: No adjustments to
    stem widths, discrete blue zone positioning.  This is what FreeType uses
    for its 'light' (auto-)hinting mode.

  * A new option `-a` has been implemented to select the stem width mode for
    the three rendering targets (grayscale, GDI ClearType, DW ClearType). 
    This supersedes option `-g`, which is now deprecated.

  * Stem widths for the hinting process can now be manually set using the
    new `width` keyword in a control instructions file.  This is especially
    useful for extra-bold fonts, where the algorithmically derived values
    are often too large, causing the filling of 'eyes' in 'e' or 'a' glyphs
    at small sizes.

  * libttfautohint gets now installed as a DLL or static library (or both,
    depending on the parameters of the `configure` script), together with
    its header files.

  * Two functions have been added to the library: `TTF_autohint_version` and
    `TTF_autohint_version_string`, which do the obvious.

  * Two options to `TTF_autohint` have been added: `alloc-func` and
    `free-func`.  These are necessary on some platforms if ttfautohint is
    compiled as a shared library, and the application uses a different
    runtime library.  This can happen, for example, on the MS Windows
    platform if your program is written in Python and communicates via the
    'ctypes' interface with the ttfautohint DLL.

  * `TTF_autohint` options
    `{gray,gdi-cleartype,dw-cleartype}-strong-stem-width` are now superseded
    by `{gray,gdi-cleartype,dw-cleartype}`-stem-width-mode` to handle the
    new natural stem width mode also.

  * Bug fix: Later control instructions now correctly overwrite earlier
    entries as documented.