[ft-devel] FreeType 2.4.5 has been released
FreeType 2.4.5 has been released. It is available from http://savannah.nongnu.org/download/freetype/ or http://sourceforge.net/project/freetype/files/ The latter site also holds older versions of the FreeType library. See below for the relevant snippet from the CHANGES file; users of version 2.4.4 should upgrade. Enjoy! Werner -- FreeType 2 is a software font engine that is designed to be small, efficient, highly customizable, and portable while capable of producing high-quality output (glyph images) of most vector and bitmap font formats. Note that FreeType 2 is a font service and doesn't provide APIs to perform higher-level features, like text layout or graphics processing (e.g., colored text rendering, `hollowing', etc.). However, it greatly simplifies these tasks by providing a simple, easy to use, and uniform interface to access the content of font files. FreeType 2 is released under two open-source licenses: our own BSD-like FreeType License and the GPL. It can thus be used by any kind of projects, be they proprietary or not. -- CHANGES BETWEEN 2.4.4 and 2.4.5 I. IMPORTANT BUG FIXES - A rendering regression for second-order Bézier curves has been fixed, introduced in 2.4.3. II. IMPORTANT CHANGES - If autohinting is not explicitly disabled, FreeType now uses the autohinter if a TrueType based font doesn't contain native hints. - The load flag FT_LOAD_IGNORE_GLOBAL_ADVANCE_WIDTH has been made redundant and is simply ignored; this means that FreeType now ignores the global advance width value in TrueType fonts. III. MISCELLANEOUS - `FT_Sfnt_Table_Info' can now return the number of SFNT tables of a font. - Support for PCF files compressed with bzip2 has been contributed by Joel Klinghed. To make this work, the OS must provide a bzip2 library. - Bradley Grainger contributed project and solution files in Visual Studio 2010 format. - Again some fixes to better handle broken fonts. - Some improvements to the B/W rasterizer. - Fixes to the cache module to improve robustness. - Just Fill Bugs contributed (experimental) code to compute blue zones for CJK Ideographs, improving the alignment of horizontal stems at the top or bottom edges. - The `ftgrid' demo program can now display autohinter segments, to be toggled on and off with key `s'. ___ Freetype-devel mailing list Freetype-devel@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freetype-devel
Re: [ft-devel] ttfautohint: How to install
Thanks again for your invaluable help in testing ttfautohint! My pleasure. Very keen to see a working autohinter available to font designers :) The feedback i'm getting from my screenshots is that the ttfautohint output is overall superior under DirectWrite to the original hinted fonts. Just seems to be a little extra 'something' needed to get the GDI sorted too :) Please try the current git snapshot and play with the options --hinting-range-min and --hinting-range-max. Currently, the default value for hinting-range-max is 1000; this means that the autohinter tests all ppem values up to 1000 to find hinting sets. However, the larger the ppem, the larger the blue zones. And by design, the autohinter ignores blue zones which are larger than 3/4 pixels. If you limit hinting-range-max to a value where the blue zones are still handled, the generated bytecode uses this hinting set for all larger sizes also. Finding a good value for hinting-range-max has to be done with trial and error, but a waterfall already indicates bad sizes, so hinting-range-max must be less than that). Yep. I will test these ranges make available any relevant screenshots. The adverse effects of having a very small value for hinting-range-max must be analyzed also; it essentially means that some horizontal segments which at larger ppem values no longer align are still treated as edges. Maybe it helps if I introduce options to manipulate the `gasp' table, making it possible to set an upper limit for applying hints. Finally, I don't know yet whether it makes sense to directly manipulate the 3/4 pixels limit (perhaps by deactivating this threshold completely). This needs further testing. I am curious - as i understand it(?) ttfautohint uses freetype to find snap zones etc from which it bases it's TT instructions output. So what mileage could there be in using a patched freetype tree with ttfautohint? I'm thinking of some of Infinality patches that have attempted to tweak Freetype's hinting routines. Some i think were attempting to give more aggressive, cleartype-like rendering. Is there anything to learn from those patches when tweaking ttfautohint? many thanks -vern Werner ___ Freetype-devel mailing list Freetype-devel@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freetype-devel
Re: [ft-devel] ttfautohint: How to install
I am curious - as i understand it(?) ttfautohint uses freetype to find snap zones etc from which it bases it's TT instructions output. I've copied a large part of the autofit module into ttfautohint; additionally, I'm calling some FreeType routines for generic reading and parsing of the input font. So what mileage could there be in using a patched freetype tree with ttfautohint? ttfautohint doesn't use a modified FreeType library. However, the copied autofit stuff has been slightly modified since I have to access various data structures which aren't publicly exposed normally. I'm thinking of some of Infinality patches that have attempted to tweak Freetype's hinting routines. Some i think were attempting to give more aggressive, cleartype-like rendering. The stuff from Erik regarding the autohinter is exactly this. However, I have yet to test whether I can `translate' it easily into bytecode instructions. Werner PS: BTW, I've delayed integration of Erik's patches until this release is out. ___ Freetype-devel mailing list Freetype-devel@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freetype-devel
