On Wed, 17 Oct 2012 11:31:15 -0700, Jonas Sicking wrote:
> It sounds to me that it's not generally true that autohinters can replace
> hinting. At least not yet.
>
> What would be interesting is if we could enable an autohinter in Firefox
> and use that in cases when we are sent a font which doesn't contain hints
> (is the performance overhead, if any, acceptable?)
>
> We could then support a format("woff-autohint") which would allow pages to
> send a smaller unhinted font file to browsers which support autohinting and
> a larger file to browsers that don't.
>
> That'd also put pressure on other UAs to implement autohinting if it
> becomes popular enough.
One of the issues is that people's personal preferences differ,
and it seems that many authors test their sites on systems that
are not applying hinting.
I fear that designers will not think to use woff-autohint if they
don't like hinted fonts.
Users that expect hinted fonts find many/most downloaded fonts
very poor quality because they are not well hinted. I don't know
whether this is because the fonts are not designed carefully, or
because hints are removed to reduce size.
We don't want to override hint instructions of quality fonts, but
if we (or FreeType) could detect poor or missing hints and use the
autohinter in those cases then that would be a big win.
I've added the following lines to my ~/.fonts.conf because too
many sites are using poorly hinted fonts now:
<match target="font">
<test name="family" compare="contains">
<string>@font-face:</string>
</test>
<test name="foundry">
<string>unknown</string>
</test>
<edit name="autohint">
<bool>true</bool>
</edit>
</match>
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