Adobe has open-sourced a CFF rasterizer to improve CFF hinting.
Most corporate and government Windows XP desktop installs are likely upgrade to Windows 7/8 within the year. Will hinted CFF be a viable format for web fonts once the vast majority of IE users are running IE 9/Directwrite and most phones/tablets have better a better CFF rasterizer and a HIDPI screen? Will anyone care at that point, or will TTF have too much momentum to overcome (assuming that either Robohint or a working version of Fontlab 5.1 finally arrives)?
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But remember what we are talking about? if there is enough resolution so that auto hinting will always work on any font of any script, then hinting is probably not very, or at most, marginally important. If that's the case, why not just turn off the hints, as opposed to switching formats, much less to a format who's main advantage is web-relatively rather inflexible file sizing. It could change with the sudden surge in popularity of say, a 130 dpi device, but that isn't a likely spot, it seems, for devices to develop.
Regarding FreeType on-the-fly autohinting, I understand that there is a switch in FreeType which a client app can set, as to whether to do autohinting or to respect the hints in a font. I expect this would be true for CFF as well.
I agree with John's assessment as to the future of CFF and TTF.
> Is CFF suitable for Chinese and Japanese web fonts in regard to file size?
Yes, very much so.
> Or can those be better handled with component-based TT fonts?
Not particularly better, no. (IMO)
> In practice, however, I have not heard anything about subset ability, so all subsetting must be pre-cff conversion.
It is not a lot harder than TTF subsetting. It can be done dynamically (on the fly).
Meiryo uses y-direction instructions for stroke reduction at small sizes, so is a good example of something that is possible with TTF that isn't possible with CFF. But, again, this ceases to be an advantage as resolutions and, hence, the ppem sizes accessible to display typical text sizes on screen increase.
What's the purpose of open-sourcing it — to encourage the Webkit & Mozilla maintainers to integrate it into the browser rendering engines, so text renders in a browser-specific way rather than platform-specific?
And are folk suggesting that even when tripling the device resolution, autohinting CFF solves CJK well enough for text sizes?
When we're talking about CFF, we're pretty much always talking about autohinting, yes? Does anyone manually hint PS fonts since Adobe made their autohinter available with AFDKO? The last time I manually hinted a PS font was Adobe Devanagari, and Adobe promptly dumped all my hints and ran their autohinter on it. I gave up after that.
...you must mean around 67 ppm you can stop hinting CJK, (that's 265 dpi 18 pt).
No, I am saying that CFFs can as well. You said that all subsetting must be prior to CFF conversion. I am saying that is definitely not the case.