Re: [ft] Change in monochrome rendered font behaviour from 2.5.0.1 to 2.5.1

[Werner LEMBERG]

>> It's intentional.
>
> Thanks for clarifying that and for your explanation. Is this covered
> in the Changelog somewhere?

No.  The feature itself was announced for 2.4.5 as

    - If autohinting is not explicitly disabled, FreeType now uses the
      autohinter if a TrueType based font doesn't contain native
      hints.

and it was actually a bug that FreeType did only look at the `glyf'
table, ignoring `prep' and `fpgm'.  Since it was a rather minor bug
fix, I didn't add an entry to the `CHANGES' file.

>> Unfortunately, the DejaVu Sans Condensed Bold font (version 2.34)
>> is lying: It contains both an `fpgm' and `prep' table, but not a
>> single glyph is hinted!
>
> Is there an easy way to see whether those tables exist and if there's
> no hinted glyphs?

Using ttx, you might say

  ttx foo.ttf

then open the output file `foo.ttx', search for `<glyf>', go to this
place, then search for `[ ]'.  If you don't get a hit, there are no
hints.

> It seems like the instructions are intentionally disabled due to
> Condensed's "experimental" status:
> 
>  
> <https://github.com/dejavu-fonts/dejavu-fonts/blob/master/scripts/generate.py#L37>

As James mentioned, it is a bug that they didn't remove the `fpgm' and
`prep' tables also.

>> The second best solution is to set up a FontConfig rule that
>> enforces auto-hinting for this font.
>
> From looking into this and trying it, am I correct in thinking this
> won't work with PIL/Pillow because it doesn't use fontconfig?

No idea, sorry.


    Werner