Eric Schrijver <[email protected]> skribis: > I do think all this shows hinting is still a bit of a black art. Am I > correct in thinking that most projects could at first get by using the > automated hinting of the design programs? Or is that typographic > blasphemy :)
My opinion is based on PostScript hinting; for TrueType I am dependent on ff's autoinstructor (which benefits from good PostScript hinting). The PS Private table is crucial to hinting and FontForge doesn't make good guesses. It is a font-wide table, and cannot be broken into glyphs. Glyphs themselves need to be designed to work well with the Private table (and then the autohinter tends to work well), and this requirement puts major constraints on the dimensions of glyphs, and to a lesser degree their shapes. Thus I think that for collaborative development there should be a person who controls hinting and who can dictate changes to glyphs for the sake of hinting quality. How to do the source code management matters less, and probably isn't a great technical problem, because PostScript hinting is very terse.
