[ft-devel] Horizontal Stem Snapping in Autohinter

[Infinality]

Werner,

What are your thoughts on implementing horizontal stem snapping in the 
autohinter?  To me, this provides a substantially cleaner look to 99.5% 
of glyphs, particularly when the stems are between 1 and 3 pixels 
thick.  I think this is largely the issue when people complain about 
Freetype font rendering.

Currently, the infinality autohint patches have code inside 
af_latin_compute_stem_width() which accomplishes this.  The only issue I 
notice is on a small subset of faces at certain ppems, on "s" and "a" 
sometimes.  The middle stem tends to get under or over-represented, due 
to lack of diagonal hinting.  But to me, the benefits far outweigh the 
drawbacks, and I think it would substantially improve the quality of 
ttfautohint hinting as well.

I'd be willing to adapt the infinality code to replace the existing code 
if you were OK with it.

Thanks,
Erik