Re: [ft] ttfautohint strong-stem-width commandline default

[Werner LEMBERG]

> I am now running with --strong-stem-width='' for all invocations of
> ttfautohint in my font generation pipeline. Which I think is a more
> reasonable default than the current 'G'.
> 
> The vertical placement of horizontal stems seems to me to ba an
> ortogonal to RGB subpixel vs Grayscale horizontal sub-pixel
> rasterization.

I don't understand that paragraph.  Please reformulate.

> The two strings I think might be most useful are '' and 'gGD', is
> there a reason for not just making this a boolean toggle?

Maybe.  However, this is not urgent IMHO.

> I didn't at first realize what the following in the --help implied.
> 
>   -w, --strong-stem-width=S  use strong stem width routine for modes S,
>                              where S is a string of up to three letters
>                              with possible values `g' for grayscale,
>                              `G' for GDI ClearType, and `D' for
>                              DirectWrite ClearType (default: G)

Well, yes, this is terse, but more explanations are given in the
manual, ttfautohint.{html,pdf,txt}.

> It took me some rounds of randomly juggling switches and knobs
> throughout my font rendering stacks - trying to figure out why the
> rendered shapes in chromium differed so much from gtk+, opera,
> firefox and epiphany, turns out that the hints were different due to
> it requesting/doing rendering with "grayscale vertical hints".

Can you suggest improvements to the manual or to the output of --help?


    Werner