Autohinter project for GSoC

[Brad Neimann]

Hi all,

I hope I’m not too late with this, but I am very interested in helping 
out with the GSoC project to improve the auto-hinting of glyphs with 
diacritics and other small elements. I have been irritated by poor 
rendering of characters such as ‘ã’ and ‘ḷ’ for quite a while, so would 
be excited to get an opportunity to fix this! I have background in both 
programming and linguistics (especially writing systems), and after 
talking a bit to Werner Lemberg, I believe I have the skills necessary 
to do this project. I have already compiled freetype and experimented 
with the demos, which has given me an idea of what needs fixing and some 
possible solutions.

However, I am somewhat worried about the scope of this project. I am 
completing a Master’s degree this year, and will not have the time to 
complete a full 350 h project; I’m sure I would make good progress, but 
suspect the scope of the project might need to be reduced for it to be 
feasible for me. Does anyone here have any ideas on what I could 
reasonably expect to accomplish? And would anyone even be interested in 
mentoring such a project?

Regards,
Brad