Re: ttfautohint's functionality from the removal of the infinality patch

[Alexei Podtelezhnikov]

Hi Hin-Tak

On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 2:06 PM Hin-Tak Leung
<htl10@users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> I see the infinality patch is already gone (next release, 2.13.2 I guess - 
> bits of it was removed in 2.13.1 already).

Infinality (v38) was substituted by v40 in 2.13.1. Anybody requesting
v38 got v40 instead... and nobody even noticed. That is the whole
point of the exercise: v40 is perfectly capable and better than just
good enough. Now the code is physically gone for good. It is much
better to improve faster and lighter v40 moving forward than dwelling
on unmaintained, poorly understood, and riddled with exceptions v38.

> FWIW, fontval will carry the reverse diff.

Why? Or, more precisely, why do you think that either v38 or v40 were
ever designed to mimic the corresponding versions of Microsoft engine?
That was never the case. *Both* of FreeType implementations were based
on principles described in
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/cleartype/truetypecleartype.
Both! but neither was actually tested to reproduce Microsoft
precisely. Much like we have no idea how Microsoft does ClearType
filtering, except for some public papers. If anybody, Adobe helped
here a lot more. Microsoft is multisampling for antialiasing, we
don't. Therefore, FreeType != Microsoft in any sense, including v38 !=
38 (GETINFO version).

Alexei