Re: [Freetype] Re: [Render] Arial ttf - bad rendering of some glyphs

[Antoine Leca]

Hi Vadim,

Sorry to answer so late, I was on vacation; and I think my answer may
help some other people reading here.

Vadim Plessky wrote:
> 
> Well, I am very much keen to improve fonts and do manual hinting for them.
> Unfortunately, I am not aware of any tool which allows TT hinting, but I have
> good progress with hinting of Type1 fonts.

If you can admit working on a Windows box, then give a look at Visual
TrueType.
<URL:http://www.microsoft.com/typography/tools/vtt.htm>
The tool is free as far as I can see (at least for casual users like me and
as I understand you), the support seems good to me (direct contact with the
engineer developping the product :-), like with Freetype ;-))

Of course, the process is waaaaay more complex than it is with Type1,
obviously,
but I feel you can obtain fairly good results (assuming the outlines are
good)
without having to refer to impossible tools like RoyalT (which is the
original
one, i.e. you program directly in TrueType "bytecodes"! Funny to test once,
but
not productive at all).

The bad news is that it seems impossible to escape the patents, since the
projection vectors are used everywhere in the subroutines used by VTT.


Hope it helps,

Antoine