[1 mod] Hinting: vertical stroke of ‘d’ different from ‘l’ in 14pt italic

[adoa]

Rendered in 14pt Italic

Sample Glyphs:

middle little

Description:

When playing around with the feedback tool and changing the font sizes it is interesting to watch the italic versions to dance around due to the hinting. Especially the angle of the stroke of letter ‘d’ differs from that of ‘l’ for some sizes. On the screenshot this is visible for 14pt.

Update: only occurs with full or medium hinting.

UA String:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; de; rv:1.9.2.12) Gecko/20101027 Ubuntu/10.10 (maverick) Firefox/3.6.12

[adoa (adoa)]

Automatic Screenshot

[adoa (adoa)]

Some time ago I changed my global font rendering settings. Now I use slight hinting with sub-pixel smoothing and all the letters look more consistent. Especially the down-strokes of italic letters are equal in slope. This is due to automatic hinting, right?

I have noticed that some characters like the hyphen are absolutely strangely hinted when using slight hinting and the entire font looks fuzzy. That is why I really would prefer full hinting, but as long as the down-strokes of the small Latin characters are not equal, it is extremely hard to read longer texts with italic paragraphs. My feed reader Liferea quite often displays emphasized text in italic.

Can anyone confirm that for some font sizes some characters have different down-stroke slopes in italic then using full hinting? Could this be a problem or configuration issue of my system?

Again some info about my system: Ubuntu Maverick, Ubuntu Font Beta 0.70.1 (I think) installed via a PPA of the Ubuntu Font Interest Group.