Dear FreeTypers,
I'm still worrying about the subject of anti-aliasing and hinting. A while ago I asked why anti-aliased Times Roman looked terrible, and David (I think) advised me to turn off hinting. The problem was that the hinted glyphs contained extremely narrow stems that were corrected by drop-out control for monochrome rendering; dropout control doesn't exist in FreeType's anti-aliasing system, so the resulting glyphs had gaps and looked very bad.
However, it is evident, looking at anti-aliased output in Microsoft Word on Windows, that Word is using hinting and anti-aliasing together. The evidence:
1. Word's anti-aliased glyphs are clearly grid-fitted and in any case
obviously superior to those rendered by FreeType.
2. If you strip the hinting from a TTF font and then render it in anti-aliased form using Word, the quality goes right down. The output becomes almost identical to that of FreeType.
The screen shot shows the following:
1. FreeType - anti-aliased, hinting turned off.
2. Word - anti-aliased, hinting stripped from TTF file.
3. Word - anti-aliased, TTF file contains hinting.
(1) is darker than (2) but that is probably because I am tinkering with gamma correction.
The real question is: what is Word doing to avoid drop-outs and successfully combine hinting with anti-aliasing.
Best regards,
Graham Asher
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