Werner,
This looks interesting and I'll give it a go and feedback in due course, however are there any plans to make it warp in the y direction? It appears to be x-only unless I have misread the code on my brief foray into it. Was there a reason for this? Also, does it operate in tandem with existing hinting techniques, or as an alternative? Were/are there future plans to expand upon this concept?
The kind of rendering I am after is one where the shape of glyphs is retained as much as possible; so currently I use the light hinting mode to *only hint in the y direction and then rely on subpixel rendering to improve things in the x direction. I find this the best compromise; hinting in both directions just distorts things too much for my liking.
In terms of whether to activate the option I would think it better to make it optional, for the reasons specified above - some people are likely using the light hinting mode specifically because it only affects things vertically, and this might scupper that approach.
Of course, I am commenting without having really studied in detail the affects of enabling this option, though I can tell from your posted comparison that the warped text has significantly increased the overall length of the whole sentence.
Cheers
Oliver
*I have noticed however that inter-character spacing can still affected under LIGHT hinting, is that a bug?
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Folks,
as mentioned in a previous post, the warper code of the autofit module
has been disabled a few years ago to get a clean release; later on,
David Turner has essentially stopped working on FreeType, and the code
hasn't been activated since then.
Furtunately, the code still works out of the box. I ask you to define
the `AF_USE_WARPER' macro in src/autofit/aftypes.h to activate warping
for FT_RENDER_MODE_LIGHT. It greatly enhances the `crispness' of
vertical stems; the attached images (using DejaVuSans.ttf) demonstrate
the difference.
Please comment. I wonder whether this shall be activated again.
Werner