Re: [ft] Suggestion to improve auto hinter

[Werner LEMBERG]

> - custom code in my application to draw the same glyph twice (on
>   ontop of the other) as a means to thicken things up in the case of
>   light text colours on dark backgrounds.

I'm not an expert for such rendering, but wouldn't it be sufficient to
adapt the gamma values and doing proper blending, as demonstrated in
the tutorial's example2.cpp?

> So my suggestion is could FreeType's auto hinter do something like
> this itself - e.g. if when working out all that clever latin blue
> zone stuff, could it realise that actually it's making the font
> smaller and a better result could be obtained by increasing the
> requested pixel height and hinting at that height instead?  Or make
> the hinter round up to the next line rather than round down, on the
> basis that rounding up is likely to result in more readable text?

This is probably dependent on the font.  For example, I've just run
ftdiff on pala.ttf, and the autohint's vertical size of glyphs is
basically always the same as with the unhinted glyphs.  Do you have
this `problem' all the time, regardless of the selected font?

> As you can see, number 4 is both sharp and of the requested height.

What about always adding, say, 0.25 pt to the requested font size?
You might try the ftdiff demo program, where you can specify a
non-integer font size with command line option -s.


    Werner