Comment 26 for bug 1001033

Revision history for this message
Steve White (stevan-white) wrote :

Weeble,

1) the current version of GNU FreeFont is 2012-05-03
    http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/freefont/freefont-otf-20120503.tar.gz
    http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/freefont/freefont-ttf-20120503.zip
    You may want to use these for further experiments.

2) I built and ran your program, and see similar results. But I ran it also
    on the current version of GNU FreeFont, and get constant values, for both
    the TTF and OTF versions (with FT_LOAD_DEFAULT).

3) The difference in your output in the 2010 version of FreeMono may be due
   partly to the internal representation of glyphs in OTF and TTF in the different versions.
   In the current version, and the 2009 version,
       TTF : TrueType quadratic splines.
       OTF : PS Type1 cubic splines.
   This was reversed in the 2010 release. The policy decision was mine, and has to do with which
   versions work best on different platforms, among other things.

4) Current TTF is (TrueType) hinted and instructed; OTF is only PS hinted.

5) I don't understand why the 2010 version of FreeMono gave varying results for TTF and
constant results for OTF. Could be the hinting settings. This may take some work to sort out.

6) The flipping between two values (448-384 = 64, is one pixel) in the results would be consistent with a pixel
being turned on or not. But then, one would expect a range of widths, or else all the same width... unless...
no, I can't see why. You would expect 'm' to come out wider than 'l'¸ but the numbers are reversed.
It does seem wrong.

7) The effects in question are not a problem with FreeMono. I perceive layers of misunderstandings.
    There may be bugs in the renderer calls. But the question is, again, exactly what results are *expected*?

Cheers!