Re: [ft-devel] Force PMingLiU like font do HINTING

[JustFillBug]

On 2008-12-04, address@hidden <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> I think MingLiU is a commercial font bundled to Microsoft
> Windows, and Mozilla can use Microsoft's TrueType rasterizer
> supporting patented hinting technology. If there is a case that
> the tricky application of unpatented hinting of FreeType2 to
> MingLiU, please let me know.
>

I don't parse this lines. But I was trying to solve a problem that
lib poppler cannot display MingLiU font properly with Cairo backend.

    https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15301

poppler forced NO HINTING when open a font face there. In this case, it
either has to hardcode a list of 'tricky fonts' inside poppler itself or
somehow freetype has to solve the problem for it (or tells poppler
hinting is required for some fonts.)

So anyone who use freetype or libraries that use freetype (like cairo)
will have to be make awared of this problem. I'm not sure how practical
this will be.

The problem is that most casual freetype user do not aware of these
requires hinting fonts, *and they shouldn't*. Then rendering without
hinting are useless other than showing how tricky the fonts are. 

And I'm still seeing PDF files using those fonts often.  Without
hinting.

Moving references are hinting in principle but for these fonts, forced
hinting are more practical to me.

Since people who know these fonts are in the minority, maybe for the
tricky fonts, the default should be forced hinting, unless the user knows
what he's doing and switch on a flag to signal a force
unhinting_on_tricky_font to show the tricks.