[Devel] Possible regression?

[David Chester]

Hello,

--- Rayiner Hashem wrote:
> Hello, this is Rayiner Hashem. I've been using FreeType 2.1.4 RC-2 for a
> while now, and recently switched to 2.1.4. In doing so, I noticed a
> degradation in italic font rendering.
...
> Besides that, in just general use, sites that use italic fonts extensively 
> look much worse in terms of stroke weighting across lines.

Assuming that your Adobe Times is in postscript format, this looks like it 
could be a result of the following.

From the changelog, March 27, 2003:

* src/pshinter/pshalgo3.c: the hinter now performs as in 2.1.3 and
   will ignore stem quantization only when FT_LOAD_TARGET_SMOOTH is used

There are advantages to quantizing the width, but perhaps the current 
quantization in pshalgo3.c is too coarse.  Maybe a good compromise would be 
an algorithm similar to the one in the autohinter.  This way, very thin 
stems, such as the cross bar of the 'e' in fonts like Nimbus Roman wouldn't 
be so light as they end up now at certain sizes with no quantization; and it 
would also address the sometimes uneven weight of slanted and rounded stems 
when quantization is on, which happens especially often when unfitted stems 
are around 1.5 pixels wide.

David Chester