[ft] Improving rendering quality!

[Dave Crossland]

Hi!

Vernon Adams has been doing some research into improving rendering
without an autohinter, but by adjusting various TTF "flags" that
effect rendering, and this email is based on his discussion with me so
full credit to him:

Vern and I were discussing this, and he said that an autohinter is
definitely a bonus but the crucial things are the main vertical hints,
to steady the baseline/x height/cap height lines, and hinting the
interletter spaces too.

Perhaps autohinters today attempt too much and then fail overall, and
quality could be improved by a new approach. Perhaps the conventional
wisdom on what is considered 'best practice' for hinting relates too
much to the original Truetype Specs, that targeted much smaller,
low-colour OS & screens than what we are generally dealing with today.

Anti-aliasing and 'smoothing' are much more an active part of
hint-based OS's & screens now.  The apparent rendering difference
between OT and TT on Windows GDI is maybe part of that.

A new ftdemo tool that allows setting gasp tables, anti aliasing,
metrics, vertical metrics etc would help a lot. What would be very
cool is an autohinter that combines with an auto-spacer, because it
seems that the two are interlinked.

Also, clear guidelines about how to design outlines to fit the pixel
grid would help too - see Vern's latest blog on designing Candal -
http://code.newtypography.co.uk/ - it seems stem widths with a factor
of 2 seem the way, 32, 64, 128, etc.

Werner, when will the infinality changesets be merged? That is an
interesting development environment for web fonts since it allows
switching of screen rendering modes on the fly.

(Infinality is a patched version of Freetype that gives enhanced font
rasterisation, and the ability to fine tune things since you can
create 'render profiles' and switch font rendering to/from 'Apple' or
'Windows 7' etc.  Very interesting for testing webfonts without
needing to swap platforms! Vern will soon post about it on his blog
with screenshots :-)

-- 
Cheers
Dave