Re: [Devel] Adding options to the PS Hinter

[Keith Packard]

Around 3 o'clock on Jul 5, David Turner wrote:

>   - your proposal of breaking 16-bit binary compatibility
>     by changing the type of the "load_flags" parameter in
>     FT_Load_Glyph from FT_UInt to FT_UInt32 or FT_ULong is
>     a clever idea and I'm tempted to implement it right now.

Is FT_ULong is defined as a 32-bit type on 64 bit systems?

>     I'd like to know if anyone would feel concerned about
>     this change. I doubt that it would change the binary
>     interface of FreeType on any 32-bit operating system,
>     right ??

Breaking binary compatibility on 64 bit systems would be bad; let's make 
sure that doesn't happen here.

>    In all cases, more experimentation is needed and will be
>    performed. It seems that we might be able to completely
>    forget about this patent non-sense in a relatively short
>    time.. Good, really good :-) !!

Have you started thinking about how to fix diagonal elements?  Seems like
we could discover parallel edges in the glyph and integerize the distance
between them so that the diagonals appeared the same size as an equivalent
stem.  That's one of the most noticeable problems right now when dealing
with gothic fonts.

A harder problem would be to retain the angular relationship between 
diagonoal elements in glyphs; I've seen the autohinter do weird things
with ¥ in some fonts.

Keith Packard        XFree86 Core Team        HP Cambridge Research Lab