Re: [ft-devel] Turning off stem darkening by default until all drivers support it?

[Jan Alexander Steffens]

On Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 9:24 AM, Nikolaus Waxweiler <address@hidden> wrote:
> I noticed that Liberation Sans/Serif/Mono and Open Sans looked pretty
> ClearType-y with hintfull

I think that is because they just choose not to do any (or much)
Y-snapping, even though they could, since they were designed with
FreeType in mind.

I believe the "ignore X mode" you get by default when SUBPIXEL_HINTING
is defined tries to get a ClearType-y result out of classic X-and-Y
fonts made for pre-ClearType engines. Though, that doesn't quite
explain why Segoe UI and Consolas are so terrible without it. Maybe
these fonts just weren't tested with old engines, or FreeType's
version 35 (w/o SUBPIXEL_HINTING) engine is still missing important
things.

Has anyone tried those fonts (Liberation, Open Sans, Segoe UI,
Consolas) on Windows 98? Would be nice to know if it shows the same
results, since it has the version 35 engine FreeType is trying to
emulate.

Also, isn't a version 35 engine only supposed to hint for mono
rendering, while we're doing symmetrical antialiasing here?
Analogously, the version 38 engine hints for the asymmetrically
smoothed rendering of ClearType.