Hi there,
Can someone explain (or point a webpage where it is explained) in what occasions it's necessary to choose each or all of the 3 "Strong Stem width and positioning" TTFAutohint options (Grayscale / GDI Cleartype/ DWCleartype) ?
Thanks in advance.
(BTW, I managed to bottle TTFAutohintGUI for Mac with Wineskin

)
Comments
but I still don't know when it's better to click GDI and DW together or to leave only GDI (default option).
With some simple shell scripting it's very easy to create a set of fonts using the available combinations of option
-w
which can then be tested with various browsers on various platforms.The other point that is worth making because I can see that there is confusion about this is that you are not choosing GDI vs DW. You may have the font render in any of these. You are just setting a strong vs softer setting for each of these 3 instances.
My question is which of these 3 check boxes (if any) is relevant to Freetype rendering. Werner?
"C:\wfont-tools\" is where I keep the ttfautohint.exe file. You should replace this with the path where you keep it. This script creates a new folder adding "autohint" to the name and then puts each new autohinted file inside this folder with it's respective name. It's better if you have the source files in a specific folder for it rather than your desktop or something like that. When you've set everything up you simply need to drag and drop your source TTFs on top of the CMD file. Also, it should work for multiple files.
One last thing, the other flags are the ones I usually use. You may want to modify them to your liking.
When Adobe's support of Werner was announced at ATypI I applauded. Not a standing ovation or a quiet thumbs up, I applauded. That this was tweeted as "1/2 hearted" by another, is either simply out of context, or something else. What happened after that, when a MS representative asked if this wasn't "too little, to late", the answer to which is entirely in MS court, went uncommented on. After all, just about all cff hinting is good for, is rendering Larger sizes on windows, and all TTf hinting is good for is rendering Smaller sizes on windows.
Who should pay for that... Dave?
> Dave, just curious but when are you going to stop asking
> small founders for support of Adobe and Microsoft's
> scaling and rendering disabilities?
When CFF fonts' text rendering becomes good everywhere (which will be hastened by Chrome moving off GDI, and largely complete when XP is only 1% of all users - soon enough)
But then I'll turn to hassling them to fund improved CFF font hinting
> When Adobe's support of Werner was announced
> at ATypI I applauded. Not a standing ovation or a
> quiet thumbs up, I applauded. That this was
> tweeted as "1/2 hearted" by another, is either
> simply out of context, or something else.
Cool! I agree, the Google i18n folks did a very good thing with Adobe there.
> What happened after that, when a MS
> representative asked if this wasn't "too little,
> to late", the answer to which is entirely
> in MS court, went uncommented on.
The recent presentations by MS, the one at TypeCon with Matthew Carter coming to my mind although any recent one will likely do, show that their text rendering folks seem to have been unable to argue against regressing the quality of test rendering, the Surface (iPad) obsession throwing it asunder.
John Hudson says, all problems are ultimately legacy problems. MS has hella legacy problems. I'm sympathetic to their plight; I pit-pit-pi....
> After all, just about all cff hinting is good for,
> is rendering Larger sizes on windows, and
> all TTf hinting is good for is rendering Smaller
> sizes on windows.
You don't think the latest cff renderers do good with text?
> Who should pay for that... Dave?
I'm hoping Adobe will hurry up and make its CFF autohinter libre software so I can hassle small founders to contribute to its improvement.
We should all pay for what we all benefit from. No?
When there is enough resolution for it not to matter, sure.
You do understand why TT exists though... don't you.
DC>We should all pay for what we all benefit from. No?
The appearance of fonts at large sizes on low res Windows devices is hardly an issue we or any founder will "benefit" from solving. It's not like anyone asks us for better rendering at large sizes on low res Windows devices as a condition of licensing, ever.
And... if there is no announced end to ClearType of all kinds, why would I or any intelligent person, think this is a legacy issue.
Lol... thus assuring an untarnishable future.
Dave, asking small foundries to pay for legacy rendering problems, is that "Personal opinion only, natch:" or an "annoying corporate mechanism" like substance.
Mind you, once we're talking web served fonts, what matters isn't the pre-compressed file size, or even the compressed file size per se, but the download time and the decompression time. The latter is one of the things the Brotli team have been focusing on for WOFF 2.0, noting that there isn't always a net benefit to smaller file compression if it takes longer to decompress than it would to download a larger file.
Sorry to misinterpret. It was rather loud in there. If we are talking about hinting a font, for an app, for a phone, or for only phones, and only Windows phones, the quality benefit of CFF is minimal.
and Simon..."Perhaps this move would have been more useful three or four years ago?"
Waiting for the small foundries to pay for a parallel universe of tools for cubics and quadratics — yes, that is slow. I wish we and a format that combined them.
The -f option chokes the current version of ttfautohint on my machine and brings up a 'Unknown script tag [fontname]' error. Remove the option and all is well.