Scrapping properties seems like a bad idea.
Inside a minor version definitely. This was more a thought for a hypothetical fontconfig 3.0.0. This would also, as far as I can see, need a new load flag in FT to indicate the desired hinting behavior.
Re-defining what existing properties actually do in regards to rendering seems like the way to go. Do anything possible via default configuration and use the current hintstyles to do what's desired.
You mean, do something like x-and-y-if-supported-native-hinter = hintfull, y-only-native-hinter = medium, y-only-autohinter = slight? That might work just as well. In case that's what it already means, it needs to be better documented.
Also, rendering is subjective.
True, but only partly. People have strong opinions about what looks best to them, but this is more about jarring differences in hinting behavior and output quality. The DejaVu family vs. Cantarell in a standard Fedora installation is a case in point for different hinting behavior, but there is more.
What prompted me initially to propose a global hintslight was a long thread in a comments section of an article about a new distribution release. Somebody complained that the fonts in the main screenshots looked low-quality (inconsistent kerning, ...) like in many other distributions. I presume that most distributions use the defaults, so I figured, why not go to the source.
Most fonts in the wild are TrueType (.ttf) fonts. Hinting them well takes more time than most open-source efforts can muster and using ttfautohint to do the job is basically using FreeType's autohinter. On top of that, FreeType's subpixel hinting code for ClearType support is still experimental and disabled by default, so many fonts on the web will not really render as intended!
Hintfull as the global default will show users less-than-ideal rendering results out of the box. FreeType's autohinter (hintslight) in contrast hints most fonts I encountered quite well, regardless of font format. So I propose hintslight as the default with a note to users that still want their DejaVu razor sharp :)
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