[ft-devel] ttfautohint 0.96 has been released

[Werner LEMBERG]

ttfautohint 0.96 has been released.

The source tarball, statically-linked binaries for Win32 (TTY and GUI) and
OS X (TTY only) are available from

    http://savannah.nongnu.org/download/freetype/

or

    http://sourceforge.net/projects/freetype/files/ttfautohint/0.96

Instructions to build the GUI version on OS X can be found at

    http://freetype.org/ttfautohint/osx.html


Enjoy!


   Werner


PS: Downloads from savannah.nongnu.org will redirect to your nearest
    mirror site.  Files on mirrors may be subject to a replication
    delay of up to 24 hours.  In case of problems use
    http://download-mirror.savannah.gnu.org/releases/


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http://freetype.org/ttfautohint

This project provides a library which takes 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.

The library has a single API function, `TTF_autohint'; see
`lib/ttfautohint.h' for a detailed description.  Note that the library
itself won't get installed currently.

A command-line interface to the library is the `ttfautohint' program; after
compilation and installation, say

  ttfautohint --help

for usage information, or say

  man ttfautohint

to read its manual page.

A GUI to the library is `ttfautohintGUI'; it uses the Qt4 framework.  The
compilation of this application can be disabled with the `--without-qt'
configuration option.


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New in 0.96:

* Option `--components' has been replaced with `--composites': By default,
  the components of a composite glyph are now hinted separately, since tests
  has shown that this gives good results in most cases.  If this option is
  set, however, the composite glyph itself gets hinted (and the hints of the
  components are ignored).

  An unfortunate side effect is that ttfautohint's option `-c' (which stays
  as a shorthand for `--composites') now does exactly the opposite as in
  previous releases.

* Older versions of Monotype's `iType' bytecode interpreter have a serious
  bug: The DIV instruction rounds the result, while the correct operation is
  truncation.  This caused `exploding characters' with fonts hinted by
  ttfautohint.  Since many printers contain this rasterizer without any
  possibility to update to a non-buggy version, ttfautohint now contains
  work-arounds to circumvent the problem.

* Better support for glyphs where some points have almost the same position
  (for example glyph `Oslash' in font `Roboto-Thin').

* Better support for glyphs which use explicit `on' points around round
  extrema.