[ft] v40 hinting engine and load flags?

[Pierre Ossman]

Hi,

I've just updated to Fedora 26 and unfortunately I have to say that I 
find the new v40 engine makes many of the fonts I encounter to be 
noticeably harder to read. One such example is DejaVu Sans Mono, which 
is the default monospace font on Fedora.

I found the documentation for the environment variable to override this, 
so the immediate issue is resolved. But thinking long term I'd like to 
hear your opinions on tying this in to the load flags.

Before 2.7 the load flags generally meant that NORMAL was hinted in both 
directions and LIGHT only vertically. The new code however has no mode 
that hints fully. Have you considered tying v35 to NORMAL and v40 to 
LIGHT? That would retain previous behaviour better. It would remove the 
current behaviour of forcing autohinting with LIGHT, but I'm not sure if 
that is needed now that v40 exists.

(The documentation also states that LCD is a variant of LIGHT, but that 
doesn't seem to be true in my testing)

Regards
--
Pierre Ossman