[ft-devel] Status of TT_CONFIG_OPTION_UNPATENTED_HINTING

[Steven Johnson]



Apologies in advance if this has been covered... I have been poking thru the archives and don't see this addressed directly.

 

I've been using FT 2.1.10 to extract glyph outlines of various fonts, and recently encountered the longstanding issue with fonts like MingLiu that require hinting to be enabled in order to get the proper outline.

 

I was hoping to be able to simply enable TT_CONFIG_OPTION_UNPATENTED_HINTING, but I am finding that using it indiscriminately causes some fonts to return profoundly wrong outlines (e.g., the A and V from Arial).

 

Is this a "known" bug in the unpatented code (perhaps the reason it is not enabled by default)? If so, has anyone discovered any workarounds (aside from licensing the patents and using the normal bytecode interpreter)?

 

Alternately, is there any reasonable way to determine if a font requires hinting to return a useful outline (aside from hard-coding a list of known bad fonts)?

 

Thanks in advance for any advice.