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Masahiro Sekiguchi | 1 Apr 2011 01:59
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Re: Partially hinted fonts


> I have noticed that several of the non-Latin fonts we ship in Fedora contain 
> partial hinting information, usually not covering (or covering only very 
> poorly) the intended target alphabet(s) of the fonts.

It is a common practice in so-called CJK regions.

> This is a problem because the version of Freetype in Fedora 15 will see that 
> there is some hinting bytecode and try to use the bytecode interpreter 
> rather than the autohinter on the entire font. If the relevant characters 
> are then not actually hinted, those characters will be entirely unhinted, 
> looking blurry.

Hmm.  I didn't noticed it.

It is really a big problem.  With very few exceptions, almost all CJK
fonts are *partically* hinted.  (I'm not familiar with fonts for other
scripts, but I guess there are some more with similar situations.)
That means most of the CJK fonts will not work well in Fedora.

> According to Freetype upstream, you should remove all hinting bytecode from 
> the fonts if it's not complete.

> Please go through your fonts, especially non-Latin fonts, looking for 
> hinting bytecode, and if it isn't anywhere near complete, please remove it 
> from the font.

It may be acceptable for a short term workaround, but I don't think it
is an appropriate solution.  We could remove those partial hints from
all the Fedora distributed fonts, but we have no control over other
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Behdad Esfahbod | 1 Apr 2011 02:53
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Re: Partially hinted fonts

On 03/31/11 19:59, Masahiro Sekiguchi wrote:
> What happens if I propose Fedora to simply exclude those bytecode
> support in Fedora distribution of FreeType, as in the past? 

FWIW, this problem was the main reason that under my maintenance, we didn't
enable the bytecode interpreter.

I think the default should remain as not using the bytecode, and use
fontconfig config to whitelist fonts.  Or use fontconfig to blacklist...

To be honest, I don't fully agree with upstream.  Autohinter and bytecode
*can* be used together.  The results won't be optimal, but much better than
the current output.  Maybe someone can bring up the multi-script font use case
with upstream and convince them to reconsider.

behdad
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Qianqian Fang | 1 Apr 2011 06:00
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Re: Partially hinted fonts

On 03/31/2011 07:59 PM, Masahiro Sekiguchi wrote:
>> I have noticed that several of the non-Latin fonts we ship in Fedora contain
>> partial hinting information, usually not covering (or covering only very
>> poorly) the intended target alphabet(s) of the fonts.
> It is a common practice in so-called CJK regions.

it is an unfortunate situation, but the difficulties are clear:
1) there are so many CJK characters 2) we don't have efficient tools
to make the hint and 3) even hinted characters are not perfect on
all screens.

I can't say for CJK in general, but for Chinese fonts, even
in commercial ones, fonts with Chinese glyph hinted
are VERY rare. Most of them are unhinted at all, even for
non CJK glyphs. Some of them embed bitmaps. The only Chinese
font that comes with hinting is the Sans/Hei-styled Yahei/JhengHei
[1] shipped in Vista/Win7. The rumor was that MS payed Monotype
$100 per glyph to create the hinting for the Chinese characters.
And I believe it is true!

The hope for Chinese users to have improved rendering on
Linux is autohinting. Sadly, the autohinter in freetype
performs poorly at this point. Uniformity of the strokes,
alignment along the edges and baseline, rendering of the
curved strokes are far from satisfactory, actually a
lot worse than the experience using unhinted CJK glyphs.

I think the CJK autohinter in freetype2 needs a major
rework in order to make it usable. Maybe it can be
explored in some Google Summer of Code projects in the
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pravin.d.s-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org | 1 Apr 2011 06:14
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Re: Partially hinted fonts



On 1 April 2011 06:23, Behdad Esfahbod <behdad-muU0i0fqO+Mdnm+yROfE0A@public.gmane.org> wrote:
On 03/31/11 19:59, Masahiro Sekiguchi wrote:
> What happens if I propose Fedora to simply exclude those bytecode
> support in Fedora distribution of FreeType, as in the past?

FWIW, this problem was the main reason that under my maintenance, we didn't
enable the bytecode interpreter.

I think the default should remain as not using the bytecode, and use
fontconfig config to whitelist fonts.  Or use fontconfig to blacklist...

Yeah, really
Having some parameter in fontconifg for disabling/enabling BCI for particular font would be best option. Removing hint instructions from fonts is not good options.

-
Pravin s
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Kevin Kofler | 2 Apr 2011 02:13
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Re: Partially hinted fonts

pravin.d.s@... wrote:
> Yeah, really
> Having some parameter in fontconifg for disabling/enabling BCI for
> particular font would be best option. Removing hint instructions from
> fonts is not good options.

It's possible to force the autohinter for a font in fontconfig, with
something like this:
http://cvs.rpmfusion.org/viewvc/rpms/freetype-freeworld/F-12/99-DejaVu-autohinter-only.conf?revision=1.1&root=free&view=markup

(I used to ship this in freetype-freeworld because of the complaints about
DejaVu looking so different with the BCI enabled, but I no longer ship this
particular config file. But a solution like this might be best for the
partially-hinted fonts we don't want to tamper with directly.)

        Kevin Kofler

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Kevin Kofler | 2 Apr 2011 02:18
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Re: Partially hinted fonts

Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> To be honest, I don't fully agree with upstream.  Autohinter and bytecode
> *can* be used together.  The results won't be optimal, but much better
> than the current output.  Maybe someone can bring up the multi-script font
> use case with upstream and convince them to reconsider.

Well, I think somebody would need to come up with a patch, too.

The current Freetype code is such that the decision whether to autohint is 
taken very early, much before the glyph is even loaded at all. So there are 
also technical obstacles to implementing per-glyph fallback.

Unlike upstream, I do think that the fallback should be per glyph, not per 
font, but I don't know how to implement this.

        Kevin Kofler

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Nicolas Mailhot | 4 Apr 2011 12:39
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Re: Partially hinted fonts


Le Sam 2 avril 2011 02:18, Kevin Kofler a écrit :
>
> Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
>> To be honest, I don't fully agree with upstream.  Autohinter and bytecode
>> *can* be used together.  The results won't be optimal, but much better
>> than the current output.  Maybe someone can bring up the multi-script font
>> use case with upstream and convince them to reconsider.
>
> Well, I think somebody would need to come up with a patch, too.
>
> The current Freetype code is such that the decision whether to autohint is
> taken very early, much before the glyph is even loaded at all. So there are
> also technical obstacles to implementing per-glyph fallback.
>
> Unlike upstream, I do think that the fallback should be per glyph, not per
> font, but I don't know how to implement this.

IMHO, Fedora should use the hinter setting most favourable to the improvement
of FLOSS fonts. That's what Fedora mission *is*.

Activating bytecode is clearly a win for fully hinted small ASCII fonts and or
proprietary fonts. Because hinting (done properly) is hard, and FLOSS requires
releasing early, and often, instead of sitting on a font till its is
"complete", I suspect the current bytecode activation will only lead to :
1. stripping of partial hints from existing fonts (killing work and making
sure full hinting will never happen)
2. use of autohinting in font editors (for a result that can be worse than
freetype's autohinter, not sure if that permits manual hinting later or not)

Thus I tend to think like Behdad its current activation is a mistake. However
I don't create fonts myself, therefore I'd like to know what the opinion of
the people managing big FLOSS projects (Dejavu, Linux Libertine, etc) is on
this situation. And I'd defer to *their* opinion. The current change has
clearly been done just because "OMG a patent has expired it must enable good
stuff" and "Arial wants bytecode" not any serious analysis of what it meant
from a FLOSS POW (some of the same people were staunch supporters of Luxi,
despite its legal status)

--

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot

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Dave Crossland | 5 Apr 2011 20:35
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Re: Partially hinted fonts

On 4 April 2011 03:39, Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas.mailhot@...> wrote:
> 2. use of autohinting in font editors (for a result that can be worse than
> freetype's autohinter, not sure if that permits manual hinting later or not)

Google has giving Werner Lemberg financial support to develop a new
autohinter, due out by mid May, which I hope will allow autohinting
inside fonts to equal or surpass freetype's on-the-fly autohinting.
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Varun Madiath | 6 Apr 2011 18:13
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fc-cache not adding fonts to system.

Hi.


Pardon me if this isn't the place to ask this, but it was the place I thought was most appropriate after a little looking around.
I'm running Fedora 15, which I am dual booting with Windows 7. On my windows partition I've installed a number of Opentype fonts that I own. I created symlinks to these fonts in a directory at ~/.winFonts and then attempted to run fc-cache -fv winFonts. The output showed me that there were a number of new fonts, however I still don't see them in any of the applications I use. Can anyone see what could be going wrong?

Sincerely
Varun Madiath
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Behdad Esfahbod | 6 Apr 2011 18:25
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Re: fc-cache not adding fonts to system.

You need to create that symlink inside your ~/.fonts/ for it to be visible to
fontconfig.

behdad

On 04/06/11 12:13, Varun Madiath wrote:
> Hi.
> 
> Pardon me if this isn't the place to ask this, but it was the place I thought
> was most appropriate after a little looking around.
> I'm running Fedora 15, which I am dual booting with Windows 7. On my windows
> partition I've installed a number of Opentype fonts that I own. I created
> symlinks to these fonts in a directory at ~/.winFonts and then attempted to
> run fc-cache -fv winFonts. The output showed me that there were a number of
> new fonts, however I still don't see them in any of the applications I use.
> Can anyone see what could be going wrong?
> 
> Sincerely
> Varun Madiath
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> fonts mailing list
> fonts@...
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fonts
> http://fonts.fedoraproject.org/
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