Comment by fxtentacle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fxtentacle | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

In 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...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27943156

Training a GAN is an interesting approach!

But one thing that I'm not sure you're aware of - is that you can get very good results without resorting to this.

The trick is basically to get Freetype to render the glyph with hinting enabled, but at increased horizontal resolution (eg 4x is enough). By stretching the glyph horizontally, you basically get rid of the vertical hinting. Because you're rendering for LCD sub-pixel display, you triple the 4x again, so you actually render horizontally at say 3*4 = 12x pixel width. This wipes out the effect of hinting horizontally, but preserves the vertical hinting, which gives you the best of both worlds. You get crisp horizontal edges, and the ability to place glyphs with sub-pixel precision on the X axis. Of course for mono-spaced fonts this doesn't matter, and for maximum crispness, you might as well just render LCD sub-pixel glyphs with full hinting, which gives results that looks similar to the example at the top of your page.

FreeType already has a v40 byte code mode that mimics the look and feel of DirectWrite hinting by disabling the horizontal adjustments; see https://www.freetype.org/freetype2/docs/hinting/subpixel-hin....

My goal was the other direction: I wanted to force my font to look pixel-perfect after it had been hinted by Windows integrated GDI ClearType renderer. But because I couldn't easily automate that one, I used Freetype to simulate it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com