> While you are working on this, have you tried it without stretching
> tilde, just centering it at the pixel boundary?
For the tilde at smaller sizes, it *must* be stretched; otherwise the
auto-hinter might align it to a blue zone, converting the wiggle into
a straight horizontal line. An additional constraint is that tilde
heights (after hinting) of less than 2px are illegible IMHO – this
cannot be fixed with clever centering.
The stretching increases with decreased glyph size; however, there is
no stretching if the glyph's height becomes too small. Up to a height
if 4px the tilde glyph is additionally tagged to be not handled by the
auto-hinter; it gets only moved away from the base glyph to ensure a
minimum distance of 1px and centered if necessary.
> I have a hunch that accents do not need distortion and only need
> clever placement: tilde at the boundary, dots at the center, etc
No other accents besides the tilde are distorted. What might be
interesting to experiment with is to suppress auto-hinting of accents
in general, only ensuring a minimum distance of 1px, then trying to
vertically center the accent. However, this is not part of the Merge
Request, and my follow-up commits won't try this either. Something
for another time (and maybe another volunteer).
Werner
