The crisp fonts saga

[John Neffenger]

On 12/17/23 12:49 PM, John Neffenger wrote:
>> That's pretty nasty. Let's enable hinting (FT_LOAD_NO_BITMAP):
>> https://ataxia.io7m.com/2023/12/12/droid_12_hinting_nobitmaps.png
> 
> Here you can really see the effect of the slight vertical-only hinting.

I zoomed in on the images, and seeing no color fringes, I now realize 
that you ran the tests with FT_LOAD_TARGET_NORMAL instead of the default 
FT_LOAD_TARGET_LCD. You did mention that you would "assume" the NORMAL 
setting, but I missed that you actually ran the tests that way.

So the vertical-only hinting is not due to the change in FreeType 2.8 
for FT_LOAD_TARGET_LCD. It's some other reason -- perhaps due to the 
hints themselves. This is now beyond my level of competence. :-)

All the more reason to change just one setting at a time. Just letting 
people enable hinting introduces all these variables:

   - native hinter vs. auto-hinter,
   - native OpenType/CFF driver vs. native TrueType driver,
   - whether the native driver and font both support
     vertical-grid-only-snapping,
   - the font choice itself and the quality of its hints.

It's enough to make your head spin. No single developer could possibly 
test all this, and it makes a small set of examples almost worthless.

Nevertheless, we know it can work because the JDK has enabled hinting 
for years, if not decades, so maybe just one step at a time. Otherwise, 
we could be swamped with such a confusion of feedback that it would be 
impossible to interpret it all.

John