Re: [Devel] Hinting metrics

[Reino Ruusu]

On Wed, 2 Jul 2003, Werner LEMBERG wrote:

> > I have been quite unsatisfied with the hinting of font metrics for
> > small point sizes.  The problem is that some inter-character spaces
> > tend to become too small and the characters fuse together.
> >
> > So I did some experimentation and ended up using this very simple
> > patch (attached) in src/autohint/ahhint.c.  It is quite a crude
> > hack, but it seems to work reasonably well.  The idea is just to
> > favor enlarging of small spaces between the glyph and it's
> > boundaries.
>
> I'm in favour of applying your patch but I don't have enough time to
> check it.  Can you provide some snapshots with and without your
> change?

I put two screenshots of a website with some text of 12px size Arial into
<http://www.hut.fi/~reiska/freetype/before.png>
and
<http://www.hut.fi/~reiska/freetype/after.png>

I think that the overall widening of character spacing at small sizes is a
bit too large and expecially italic text is rendered too sparse as can be
seen in <http://www.hut.fi/~reiska/freetype/italic.png> (look at the words
'really' and 'Jamfiles').

Some further tweaking should still be done.

-- 
Reino Ruusu