[ft-devel] bug #15454: Rendering of Hinted Postscript "b"

[Stephen Hartke]

David and Werner both have commented that the Postscript hinter has a lot of bugs, but is unlikely to be fixed anytime soon, due to a lack of time.  I've looked at the code myself, and it is reasonably complicated.

However, the auto-fitter code is both reasonably new and well-tuned.  From my understanding of how the auto-fitter works, it essentially finds Postscript-style hints for a font, and then adjusts the glyph shapes according to these hints.  The second part is just what the Postscript hinter does; would it be possible to pass the Postscript hints from a Type 1 or CFF-flavored OTF font to the hinting part of the auto-fitter?  I have tried using the auto-fitter, reasonably successfully, on CFF fonts, but the main problem is that not all places to hint are detected, and global parameters (like offshoots) are often calculated differently.  Since the CFF font already has this information, it seems the auto-fitter shouldn't need to re-figure it out.

I don't know how difficult what I'm proposing is, but it might be a way to reduce the size of the code base and the amount of effort maintaining, while still getting good results for CFF fonts.  Thanks for considering it!

Best wishes,
Stephen