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

[Steve White]

Karl,

On Feb 13, 2008 12:56 AM, Karl Berry <address@hidden> wrote:
>     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.
>
Autohinting doesn't appear to be the problem.  It is the hand-hinted
glyphs that
looked funny.  I was wondering how people chose these particular hints.

>     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
>
Got it.

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

>     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.
>
Ordered it.

Thanks!