Re: [Freefont-bugs] What's next?

[Karl Berry]

    hand-hinted -- the auto-hint feature of FontForge gives completely
    different results.  And they sometimes turn out to be hinted badly.

If autohinting doesn't work well (in the latest release of fontforge), I
expect George (Williams, the fontforge author/developer/maintainer)
would like to get a bug report.

    If somebody could point me to documents explaining the algorithms
    used for hinting

One old item with a brief conceptual overview (nothing technical) is
http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb18-4/tb57horn.pdf

George also wrote a bit about it in his article:
http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb24-3/williams.pdf

I recall that some of Karel Piska's articles in TUGboat talk about
hinting (mostly in the context of bugs in various fonts).

The technical stuff I originally read about in the Adobe specification
of Type 1.  I'm sure there have been plenty of refinements since, but
from what I've seen, that is still the basis.  Keep the stems the same
width.

    and kerning

I don't have a good online reference, but Walter Tracy's book Letters of
Credit is the best treatment of letter spacing and kerning (and a whole
lot more) in my recollection.

Best,
karl