FreeType 2 questions

[Juliusz Chroboczek]

Dear all,

I've recently had a summary look at what needs to be done for a
unified TrueType/Type 1 renderer for XFree86 based on FreeType 2.
There are a few issues I didn't manage to work out.

First of all, there seems to be a problem with beta4.  At small sizes,
there appears to be pixel dropout between curved parts of glyphs and
vertical stems (typically in lowercase `a' and `d').  As this happens
both for TrueType and Type 1 (in quite a few fonts), I believe this is
a bug.  It only happens for non-AA glyphs.

I'm aiming at not losing any functionality w.r.t. the current
renderers, and so I need to do some font-format-specific processing.
Given a face object, how do I determine the underlying font format?
Given a face object that comes from a TrueType font, how do I access
the individual TrueType tables (head, OS/2, post, hhea)?  Given a face
object that comes from a Type 1 font, how do I access data from the
font dictionary (font name, family name, copyright, etc.)?

On an unrelated note, could someone explain where the autohinter fits
in?  Is it only for fonts devoid of any other hinting, or will it be
applied to all fonts?

Thanks,

                                        Juliusz Chroboczek