Re: [Devel] Adding options to the PS Hinter

[Vadim Plessky]

On Wednesday 17 July 2002 12:24 am, George Williams wrote:
|  I have some questions about what postscript hints should look like so that
|  characters will be rendered optimally.
|
|  Let me ask about two simple cases, both rectangles. The vertical bar
| (0x7c) character and the hyphen (0x2d) character.
|
|  I looked at three adobe fonts (times, helvetica & courier).
|
|  For vertical bar I saw:
|      in Courier,  one very wide horizontal stem hint that covers the entire
|  height of |
|      in Helvetica, no horizontal stem hints
|      in Times, two horizontal stem hints of width 40, one at the top and
| one at the bottom. These look like ghost hints, except they don't conform
| to adobe's defn of ghost hints (which must be 20 or 21).
|  If the top and bottom of the vertical bar are both within bluezones then I
|  assume that ghost hints should be used (this is the case for Times). But
|  when the top and bottom are not in a bluezone what is appropriate?
|
|  And in the other dimension, what kind of vertical stem hint should there
| be for hyphen?

I think you should not worry about hinting for hyphens.
Real problem are (Cyrillic) characters ш щ Ш Щ which require VStem3 hint.
AFAIK HStem3/VStem3 hint support is not implemented in FreeType.

Besides, FreeType doesn't offer solution for Diagonal stems (hinting).
And this really hurts many fonts...

|      Courier and Times both contain a very wide vertical stem that runs the
|  width
|       of the character.
|      Helvetica contains no vertical stem.

Check Adobe Miriad, Minion, etc. fonts from ATM Deluxe 4.0
Those fonts are *more fresh* and look better, IMO.
Besides, they have rather advanced hinting.
I have used some ideas from hinting of those fonts, when I was doing manual 
hinting to some outlines.

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Vadim Plessky
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