Ttfautohint – a 99% automated font hinting process
1–10 of 14 posts
Re: Ttfautohint – a 99% automated font hinting process
#2FYI that youtube video on the landing page is from 2012
Re: Ttfautohint – a 99% automated font hinting process
#3FYI that youtube video on the landing page is from 2012
To be fair, it's not exactly a new program. But is is an important program if you work on fonts, and it's been getting steady periodic updates.
Re: Ttfautohint – a 99% automated font hinting process
#4Truetype has had an autohinter for quite some time. I'm not sure if that is the same as this. By the fact it was posted today I thought it would be referring to something new, so I read the title as "tensorflow auto hint". Now this makes me wonder if you could train a model on fonts that have manual hinting and generate a more perfect auto-hinting program from it.
Re: Ttfautohint – a 99% automated font hinting process
#5Truetype has had an autohinter for quite some time. I'm not sure if that is the same as this. By the fact it was posted today I thought it would be referring to something new, so I read the title as "tensorflow auto hint". Now this makes me wonder if you could train a model on fonts that have manual hinting and generate a more perfect auto-hinting program from it.
The original FreeType autohinter was implemented as a way to avoid the (now expired) patent covering interpreting the TTF hinting bytecode. This one refers to using the FontForge bytecode debugger so it's a newer development.
Re: Ttfautohint – a 99% automated font hinting process
#6IIRC, one limitation of this is that the fonts will look like garbage when font-smoothing is disabled (e.g. all kinds of ugly artifacts and too-thick lines).
Re: Ttfautohint – a 99% automated font hinting process
#7IIRC, one limitation of this is that the fonts will look like garbage when font-smoothing is disabled (e.g. all kinds of ugly artifacts and too-thick lines).
I can't think of any other rasterizer than Freetype that has the option to enable hinting and then disable anti-aliasing. I've never tried that combination, what would be the point of that?
Re: Ttfautohint – a 99% automated font hinting process
#8IIRC, one limitation of this is that the fonts will look like garbage when font-smoothing is disabled (e.g. all kinds of ugly artifacts and too-thick lines).
I can't think of any other rasterizer than Freetype that has the option to enable hinting and then disable anti-aliasing. I've never tried that combination, what would be the point of that?
Hinting was originally created for fonts that had zero anti-aliasing. On Windows, prior to Cleartype, all fonts were rendered in binary, so it was even more important to have hinting there (eg so that the two stems of an 'H' are equal width, or the distance between the two symmetrical parts of an 'm' are equal size).
As screen resolutions rise, the need for hinting diminishes. On a 4K desktop monitor you still benefit from hinting. I think 8K desktop monitor resolution (at say 28 inch size) is probably where hinting loses relevance.
Re: Ttfautohint – a 99% automated font hinting process
#9In my experience, hinting is becoming increasingly obsolete because most engines will create it on the spot if missing and there's more and more situations where TTF engines will completely ignore it, for example ClearType.
That's why when I wanted to have a font that is hinted perfectly for one given size, I in the end had to resolve to baking the hinting distortions into the glyph outlines itself.
Here's my blog post where I explain the problem and my brute force solution a bit more. And you can download the font to see how distorted glyphs optimized for 16px will look at other sizes.
That said, the font editor that I used also automatically runs ttfautohint, so it really is the default tool to get the job done.
https://hajo.me/blog/2021/07/24/making-a-font-that-doesnt-su...
Re: Ttfautohint – a 99% automated font hinting process
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't think of any other rasterizer than Freetype that has the option to enable hinting and then disable anti-aliasing. I've never tried that combination, what would be the point of that?
Hinting was originally created for fonts that had zero anti-aliasing. On Windows, prior to Cleartype, all fonts were rendered in binary, so it was even more important to have hinting there (eg so that the two stems of an 'H' are equal width, or the distance between the two symmetrical parts of an 'm' are equal size). As screen resolutions rise, the need for hinting diminishes. On a 4K desktop monitor you still benefi…
> On a 4K desktop monitor you still benefit from hinting.
I don’t have a 4K desktop monitor but I was curious to see if it does anything with larger fonts. Trying it out with Open Sans and it does still give an increase in contrast on a 34px title font sample, but not as significant as on the smaller body text: https://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/juxtapose/latest/embed/index....