Re: [ft-devel] twilight zone and engine compensation; and v 2.7.1 schedule?

[Werner LEMBERG]

Hello Hin-Tak!


> While comparing b66 and the older MS rasterer's backend, I found a
> rather interesting issue - the _undocumented_ behavior of a few
> hinting instructions while in twilight zone only agrees between
> freetype and MS rasterer (or the older version of it shipped with
> the 2003 FontVal), when the engine compensation distance is black.
> 
> This is somewhat surprising as I'd think they should agree when
> engine compensation distance is gray, since the distance type is
> essentially undefined when in twilight zone, or rather dodgy in any
> case, when contours are not 'real'...
> 
> Any thoughts/hints about the subtlety of hinting between twilight
> zone and engine compensation?

No ideas :-) Please ask Greg Hitchcock (and CC me); if time permits he
can then look up the sources.

> So in this case, the undocumented behavior of Freetype seems to be
> wrong - or incomplete (not adapting to engine compensation).

This is certainly true.

> Also, I found a few 'XXX undocumented' which are actually documented
> in Apple's version of the truetype reference. There are small
> differences between the apple one and MS one, in these cases, rather
> important/interesting.  [...]

Can you provide patches?

> A while go there were some words about 2.7.1 coming soon - what
> happened to that? I guess the impact is just whether to back-port
> some of the post-2.7.0 changes or just wait and rebase later.

The idea was that OpenType variation support gets added after 2.7.0,
so I made that release.  I will do 2.7.1 soon, but I don't have an
exact schedule yet.  Is there a reason to hurry?


    Werner