RE: [Devel] How about firefly's patch?

[Turner David]

Hello,

> 
> As 2.1.5 has been released, firefly and akito have updated their
> corresponding patches for freetype, which can be found separately:
> 
> http://firefly.idv.tw/setfont-xft/patches/freetype/
> http://www.kde.gr.jp/~akito/patch/freetype2/2.1.5/
> 
> 
Thanks a lot for this information, as well as to the patches' respective
authors. There has been an important number of critical patches to the
auto-hinter lately, and I'd like to integrate them all. However:

  - i currently lack the time to properly test all of them. Maybe
    someone could help us here ?

  - these patches are generally not compatible. For example
    FireFly's patch does modify the hinting of Latin fonts
    in ways that are sometimes surprising.

I have started writing another version of the autohinter, named
"autofit", that will be capable of managing script-specific
hinting; this will allow us to use completely different
algorithms where appropriate without interference. Lossely
speaking, the idea is that:

  - the charmaps of  given font are initially parsed to determine
    the script of each given glyph index (by default, every
    un-mapped glyph falls to "default", i.e. latin)

  - all script-hinters share the same basic glyph hints
    structures (i.e. points, segments and edges)

  - however, they differ by the following:

      - computation of global metrics (standard width(s) & blue zones)
      - detection of segments & edges & hint flags
      - grid-fitting based on the latter information

Hopefully, this will be released soon to the CVS, and should allow
each author to experiment with its algorithm without interfering with
others...

The result will be placed in "src/autofit", so you can continue hacking
"src/autohint" at will in the meantime...


Hope this helps,

- David Turner
- The FreeType Project  (www.freetype.org)

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