Re: [ft-devel] Force PMingLiU like font do HINTING

[James Cloos]

>>>>> "Werner" == Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden> writes:

>> And I'm still seeing PDF files using those fonts often.
>> Without hinting.

Werner> Why is there no hinting?

Poppler (and probably xpdf before it) forces no hinting because it is
rendering paper documents and is likely trying to maintain metrics et al
exactly as they would print, irregardless of the current scaling, etc.

I've tested poppler with a small patch to use FT_LOAD_TARGET_LIGHT
instead of FT_LOAD_NO_HINTING and the results are not on par.

Try it by either doing a:

find -name \*.cc -print0 | xargs -0 \
perl -pi.bak -e 's/FT_LOAD_NO_HINTING/FT_LOAD_TARGET_LIGHT/'

in the poppler src before compiling, or perhaps adding like:

  -DFT_LOAD_NO_HINTING=FT_LOAD_TARGET_LIGHT

to CXXFLAGS might work?  Then read some pdf documents in evince, linked
against that version of libpoppler.  The quality is noticeably degraded.

I'm only speculating as to their motives, of course, but I'm confident
that my hypothesis is correct.

Forcing on unpatented for the trickies would be a beneficial addition to
freetype.  Disabling that force—eg for testing—would best, I expect,
be done via an environmental.

People do embed these fonts into documents; document rendering does not
look correct when the autofitter is used, even the light variation.
So we definately need some way to allow the apps to select no hints
except for the trickies, with a central location for the list of them.

-JimC
-- 
James Cloos <address@hidden>         OpenPGP: 1024D/ED7DAEA6