Bad quality of autohinting with arial at 15 points.

[Ram'on Garc'ia Fern'andez]

With arial.ttf and times.ttf (from www.microsoft.com/typography) at 15 ppem,
the autohinter shows a quite boldened font, compared to the native truetype
hinted font, or the unhinted font.

I believe that this is a bug.

I am using freetype2-current.

There is a lot of room from improvement for the autohinter. For example,
times at 11, the character interspacing is less that with the native hinting
(although slightly more than without any hinting). The ratio height/width
is higher with native hinting than with autohinting, and the ratio with native
hinting is similar to the ratio with large sizes. This is evident with
capital letters, that look more "square" with autohinting. And the G is 
closed, so it looks like an O. The character { is deformed with autohinting
(but } is ok, the autohinter should be symmetric?).

And one question: I read that there are plans to replace the type1 driver
with type1z. The type1z driver does not implement hinting and relays on
autohinting. I do not think that this is a good idea. In many applications,
compatibility is essential. Type1 fonts rendered with Freetype should
produce the most similar posible output compared to other renderers.
Autohinting can be useful for True Type fonts, to avoid patent problems.
Otherwise native hinting should be better. There are many Type 1 fonts
that are bad hinted, but that is not an issue of Freetype, that is an
issue of the fonts themselves. Bad fonts should be fixed.

Ramon