Re: [ft-devel] DejaVuSans.ttf and v40

[Nikolaus Waxweiler]

> I have finally upgraded to 2.7 system-wide. Mostly it seems that
> stems are thicker, or more black - it takes a bit of getting used to;
> some on-line comments seem to prefer the "cleaner" v35 look. (by
> cleaner, I think they mean "thinner"...).

The thick look comes from DejaVu and the web core fonts being snapped to 
full pixels on both axes, but when in design space, the stems are much 
thicker. It takes some getting used to.

> And DejaVuSans.ttf looks very bad at 10 ppem, with both v35 and v40.
> Actually it seems to be poorer with v40. (narrower)
>
> Under v38, almost all the gyphs widen, and get more readable.

I think it looks pretty okay at 10ppem. The only real difference to the 
autohinter is the x-height snapping.

> Lastly - since v40 is now the default, why can't we have v38 compiled
> in by default also? There were good reasons not to before 2.6.4
> because the highest was the default, but it would be nice to compile
> it in by default for people who like choices (or want to experiments
> and continues to improve v40 against v38)?

I guess packagers can do that if they want to, but it's dead weight for 
the vast majority of users.