Re: [ft-devel] Status of TT_CONFIG_OPTION_UNPATENTED_HINTING

[Werner LEMBERG]

> I've been using FT 2.1.10 to extract glyph outlines of various
> fonts, and recently encountered the longstanding issue with fonts
> like MingLiu that require hinting to be enabled in order to get the
> proper outline.
>  
> I was hoping to be able to simply enable
> TT_CONFIG_OPTION_UNPATENTED_HINTING, but I am finding that using it
> indiscriminately causes some fonts to return profoundly wrong
> outlines (e.g., the A and V from Arial).
>  
> Is this a "known" bug in the unpatented code (perhaps the reason it
> is not enabled by default)?

This isn't a bug, this is the very effect caused by the circumvention
of the patented hinting code.

> If so, has anyone discovered any workarounds (aside from licensing
> the patents and using the normal bytecode interpreter)?

This is not possible.

> Alternately, is there any reasonable way to determine if a font
> requires hinting to return a useful outline (aside from hard-coding
> a list of known bad fonts)?

You might provide a user dialogue with a check box `if you see crap,
try to activate this' which sets the unpatented hinting flag for this
particular font.


    Werner