[ft-devel] ttfautohint

[Werner LEMBERG]

Folks,


I'm starting a three-month project for writing a new library which
will take a TrueType font as the input, remove its bytecode
instructions (if any), and return a new font where all glyphs are
bytecode hinted using the information given by FreeType's autohinting
module.  The idea is to provide the excellent quality of the
autohinter on platforms which don't use FreeType.

Right now, I'm still in a phase of collecting ideas, analyzing
previous art.  In particular, I've already examined the TrueType
auto-instructor of FontForge (written originally by Michał
Nowakowski), but this is too tightly integrated into FontForge to be
of much help currently.

Note that, contrary to the autohinter, generating such fonts is not a
time-critical issue.  In other words, it might be possible (probably
in a follow-up project) to add further, more time-consuming analysis
to the glyph shapes for improving the output bytecode.

Ideas, suggestions, comments are highly welcomed!  I'm especially
interested in thoughts how possible function parameters might look
like to control the generation of the hints.  Currently, it would be a
black box process (essentially the same as the autohinter).


   Werner


PS: Since I can imagine that this list is read by many people who are
    interested in this kind of stuff, I'll post here my thoughts,
    progress, etc.  If you think this is inappropriate please tell me,
    and I'll set up something different.