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[ft] Re: Improving rendering quality!


From: Werner LEMBERG
Subject: [ft] Re: Improving rendering quality!
Date: Tue, 01 Mar 2011 05:41:21 +0100 (CET)

> Perhaps autohinters today attempt too much and then fail overall,
> and quality could be improved by a new approach.

Please define `quality'.  I think this is a moving target.  And I
second your observation if you say that today's autohinting is not the
same as a few years ago.

It seems that the most `successful' mode of FreeType's autohinter is
the `light' mode, and this already restricts hinting to the y values.

> A new ftdemo tool that allows setting gasp tables, anti aliasing,
> metrics, vertical metrics etc would help a lot.

In ftview, you can manually simulate the gasp table by switching
hinting and monochrome hinting on and off.  Cleartype support on the
bytecode will be available soon too (see below), and the LCD modes
which increase the horizontal resolution by a factor of 3 are also
there already.  With ftstring you can also test vertical layout.

Please be more specific what you are missing.

> What would be very cool is an autohinter that combines with an
> auto-spacer, because it seems that the two are interlinked.

... what shall an auto-spacer do?

> Also, clear guidelines about how to design outlines to fit the pixel
> grid would help too - see Vern's latest blog on designing Candal -
> http://code.newtypography.co.uk/ - it seems stem widths with a
> factor of 2 seem the way, 32, 64, 128, etc.

I've read this, and until this blog entry I have never thought about
this issue.  If you mean with `crisper' that more stem-like features
should be align along the y-axis, then you should give the
(re)activated warper code a try which does exactly that in a quite
impressive way IMHO.

BTW, I want to see some mathematics which shows that common divisors
(and not multiples) of 2048 improve snapping.

> Werner, when will the infinality changesets be merged? That is an
> interesting development environment for web fonts since it allows
> switching of screen rendering modes on the fly.

I'm not sure that I'll add all infinality changesets as-is.  However,
the ClearType stuff gets merged rather soon.


    Werner



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