(reposting because I wasn't subscribed to the list) Hello fontconfig people, I'm currently trying to save the world, ehm, bring more order into the font rendering world. The first problem is, I personally don't like hintslight/medium/full because they are coarse descriptions that mean different things to different font formats: 1. OpenType/CFF (.otf) fonts: medium == full == snapping glyphs to the y-axis only. By design, this tries to preserve outline fidelity. 2. TrueType (.ttf) fonts: Full currently (FreeType 2.6.1) snaps to x-and-y-axis and FT doesn't fully handle ClearType yet (so no y-only-snapping like on Windows). Medium is similar to full, but seems to be less aggressive on the x-axis. Both sacrifice outline fidelity and "harmoniousness" for absolute sharpness with varying success. Even when ClearType is fully handled, it depends on the bytecode in the font if you get y-only or x-and-y snapping. 3. Postscript fonts: not sure, but the native hinter produces sub-optimal results anyway. 4. Slight invokes the autohinter regardless of font format. Like for .otfs, it snaps to the y-axis only. The problem is nicely visible when you go medium or full and mix font formats. A default installation of Fedora will have Cantarell in OpenType/CFF format in the UI and DejaVu (.ttf) on the console. Cantarell is y-snapped (and slightly emboldened), DejaVu x-and-y-snapped. The difference is jarring. The second problem is that FreeType currently doesn't fully handle ClearType. TrueType fonts developed with ClearType in mind will look sub-optimal by default. The OpenType/CFF hint support is top notch in contrast, thanks to Adobe's contributed CFF engine. The autohinter has been doing a mighty fine job across the board and for different languages for a while. I propose that fontconfig defaults to the autohinter == hintslight globally and sets hintfull only for OpenType/CFF fonts. That way, the default for all fonts is to snap them to the y-axis, leading to a much more coherent and harmonious look out of the box. Ubuntu has been doing global hintslight for years and I personally found rendering to be mostly fine there. Ideally, fontconfig exposes something like "hintnative", "hintauto", "hintnone" and the modifiers "y-only", "x-and-y-if-supported", and scraps "hintslight/medium/full" and the "hinting" and "autohint" attributes. Thoughts? _______________________________________________ Fontconfig mailing list Fontconfig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/fontconfig
