Re: [ft-devel] a hidden gem: the autohint warper code

[JustFillBug]

On 2011-03-01, Miles Bader <address@hidden> wrote:
> Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden> writes:
>> What is improvable, however, is
>> the algorithm to decide which stems are `main features', and which
>> features (e.g. serifs) must be handled specially.  In particular,
>> handling of diagonal stems might be improved.
>
> BTW, that's what sort of worried me about the recent hacks to the CJK
> autohinter:
>
> It seemed to work OK in the case posted, because the major "skeleton"
> strokes of the characters were grid-aligned, and the non-aligned (and
> thus less visible) strokes seemed well-chosen.
>
> But is that somehow guaranteed...?  It seems like the result not
> aligning important strokes when minor strokes _were_ aligned would
> result in _less_ readable results than simply grid-aligning everything
> (as I guess happens now)...

It seems the hack assume stem are sperated by at least 1 pixel. The
counter hinting concept of type1 font.

So if 2 stems touched, the 2nd one was rendered non-aligned, thus
grayscaled. The result is a bit fuzzy becaues of using grayscale instead
of gridfitting. 

I guess it works better on odd stem sets (日) but not so well on even
stem sets (且), the last stem will be fuzzied. Even if the 1st and last are
gridfit, how to represent the middle 2 stems? A glob of gray or a
zig-zag gray? or a verticle line?