Re: [ft] v40 hinting engine and load flags?

[Werner LEMBERG]

> 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.

A screen shot comparison would be nice.  The term `harder' is very
subjective.

> 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?

Short answer: no.  We are going to follow Microsoft w.r.t. hinting.
Essentially all newer fonts only do hinting for v40, since this is
today's de-facto standard.

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

Please elaborate.


   Werner