Comment 4 for bug 615787

Malcolm and I had a quick brainstorm at how to do this on Tuesday 2010-11-16, thus the reckoning:

The key is to move the nodes for each component of the glyph to all be in the same position, the easiest way of doing this is to multiple the x and y coordinates by zero so that they all end up at the same position in the corner/edge creating a zero-width line and thus "disappearing". It needs to be possible to distinguish the four states:

  (a) Manual hints no used, this will be the default rendering of the glyph)
  (b) Manual hints in use (size readout, preferably human readable)
  (c) Manual hints in use (size bigger than read-out).

Each of these must be visually distinguishable from each other. We know from relying on the DejaVu substitution (a) is shown by "88", that "01"? to "87" was PPM sizes from the hint engine and that (c) is rendered as "HI".