Re: [ft] libfreetype/autohint feature

[Werner LEMBERG]

> "FontForge allows you to hint your font (and even provides an
> Autohint function), but in practice this step is not strictly
> necessary.  Modern operating systems often have better grid-fitting
> functionality built into their text rendering engines than you can
> create yourself without expending considerable time and effort.  In
> fact, Mac OS X and Linux both ignore any hints embedded in the font
> file itself.

This is not correct.  Many (if not all) GNU/Linux distributions allow
configurations to enable native TrueType hinting.  The same is true
for CFF and/or Type 1 hints.  Even recent MacOS versions use TrueType
hinting under very special circumstances, mainly to properly render
old CJK fonts that use bytecode to shift and scale components of
composite glyphs.

> So my question is, is there a way I can completely disable
> auto-hinting?

This is an interesting question.  Unfortunately, the answer is no, as
Lawrence already pointed out.  There is no universal possibility for
the font to tell the rasterizer: "I don't want to be hinted."
TrueType provides such a switch within the font, BTW, but neither CFF
or Type 1 have this by design.

> If I'm correct it is the engine that decides how much extra hinting
> it wants to do on a particular font, and rather not the font itself.

Exactly.

> Let me know if this is possible if I got this right.

In case your OS uses the fontconfig library to manage fonts it should
be possible to configure your OS to apply no hints to your font.  Of
course, this is not a generic solution that is valid everywhere.


    Werner