RE: [ft-devel] Re: disappointing results with autohinting

[Graham Asher]

Antoine,

For my purposes the quality shown in the image I sent is completely 
unacceptable. To give just one example, the two bottom points of the letter 'w' 
are at different heights at small sizes. This makes it impossible to use.

Yes, it is readable, but that is not enough.

Best regards,

Graham

-----Original Message-----
From: address@hidden [mailto:address@hidden On Behalf Of Antoine Leca
Sent: 25 May 2007 09:02
To: address@hidden
Subject: [ft-devel] Re: disappointing results with autohinting

Graham Asher wrote:
> I am getting very bad results autohinting Times New Roman (times.ttf
> from Microsoft): see the attached image.

I know this is highly subjective, but I will not qualify the image you sent
as "very bad."
Surely there are defects, but it seems readable to me.

In fact I remember looking at the bitmaps used at the beginning of the GUIs,
around 1985, and in my record the ones used by Microsoft (TmsRmnE/F.fon) was
more or less of this "quality", perhaps a bit better but not much.

Also keep in mind that Times New Roman (from Monotype) is one of the most
carefully hinted font available, so the comparison between the result of a
real-time algorithm (even done in 200x) versus several man×month of work
done by specialists (even done in 1991) should invariably shows the latter
as better.
Furthermore, Times Roman itself is a very carefully studied font (to get the
highest possible efficiency of ink and space over words), so while it is a
good --and valid-- basis for testing, perhaps more "easy" fonts such as
Verdana, Helvetica, Cheltemham, Century Schoolbook, might yield "better"
results, at the price of a bigger advance for each character.


My 0.02 €, which may or may not help.

Antoine



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