The crisp fonts saga

[John Neffenger]

On 12/14/23 4:39 AM, Mark Raynsford wrote:
> The key point is "keep text aligned to the pixel grid". The thing is:
> This isn't affected by hinting or the lack of it whatsoever, at least
> with the way text is implemented in Prism and Freetype, as far as I can
> tell.

It seems to have influenced the original choice for JavaFX. Felipe 
Heidrich addresses the font scaling issue at 30:54 in his presentation:

Hinting (30m 54s into the video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCrCni6EVek&t=1854s

When using hinting, he says ...

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You're going to compromise the intent, and again, you're going to 
compromise the linearity. So again, if you start scaling, things are 
going to start jumping.

They're going to start jumping because they've got to fix the pixel grid 
here and there, or just like, the stems or the crossbars in the glyphs 
are going to ... it will go like, point 12, point 13, 14, and things 
look to be going well, then go 14, 15, kind of gives a jump and 
everything kind of doubles.

It's because of, that's, you're on the next table in your font and 
that's what the hinting told you to do. And again, so you don't have a 
nice linear, uh, projection of your font.

So all we had here are just workarounds. [Quoting Beat Stamm] "The 
keywords here are workarounds and tolerable. Workarounds aren't real 
solutions, and they may not be equally tolerable to everybody."
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Then he refers to "The Raster Tragedy at Low-Resolution," by Beat Stamm, 
which is now "The Raster Tragedy at Low-Resolution Revisited." Chapter 6 
talks about hinting:

6 Discussions
http://rastertragedy.com/RTRCh6.htm

John