[Pkg-fonts-devel] Bug#754926: Bug#754926: Bug#754926: Needs freetype CFF hinting engine

[Kan-Ru Chen (=?UTF-8?Q?=E9=99=B3=E4=BE=83=E5=A6=82?=)]

Fabian Greffrath <fabian at greffrath.com> writes:

> Hi there,
>
> Am Sonntag, den 12.10.2014, 01:34 +0900 schrieb Changwoo Ryu: 
>> AFAICS, Noto Sans CJK highly depends on this new hinting engine.
>
> I'd consider a font that depends on a specific hinting engine for proper
> rendering as broken by design.

The rendering of Noto Sans CJK glyphs is not "broken" but the rendering
result with the new CFF engine is considered better. AFAIK that's also
the motivation behind the contribution of the new CFF engine.

>> Rendering of Noto Sans CJK glyphs is severely broken with the old
>> hinting engine.
>
> Freetype still allows for selection between native hinting and
> auto-hinting. If one of both leads to significantly better results, we
> could still enforce this hinting method for this font by means of a
> fontconfig rule.

Auto-hinting tends to make this font thinner than it really is. I
currently use hintslight since the new CFF engine is disabled.

Here is a comparison I made using different settings:
https://kanru.info/blog/archives/2014/08/04/source-han-sans-and-freetype/

Note the first picture and the last is in same weight `Normal' but they
looks so different. If we decided to ship freetype with new CFF engine
disabled in Jessie, we might risk to stay using the old engine forever
because users & programs are tuned to it. Users might also get
inconsistent result of other distributions or platforms.

Kanru
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