Re: [Devel] Adding options to the PS Hinter

[George Williams]

I have some questions about what postscript hints should look like so that 
characters will be rendered optimally.

Let me ask about two simple cases, both rectangles. The vertical bar (0x7c) 
character and the hyphen (0x2d) character.

I looked at three adobe fonts (times, helvetica & courier).

For vertical bar I saw:
   in Courier,  one very wide horizontal stem hint that covers the entire 
height of |
   in Helvetica, no horizontal stem hints
   in Times, two horizontal stem hints of width 40, one at the top and one at
        the bottom. These look like ghost hints, except they don't conform to
        adobe's defn of ghost hints (which must be 20 or 21).
If the top and bottom of the vertical bar are both within bluezones then I 
assume that ghost hints should be used (this is the case for Times). But 
when the top and bottom are not in a bluezone what is appropriate?

And in the other dimension, what kind of vertical stem hint should there be 
for hyphen?
   Courier and Times both contain a very wide vertical stem that runs the 
width
        of the character.
   Helvetica contains no vertical stem.