Quote:
Originally Posted by kacir
I have managed to install and run FontForge on Windows at work, and that was the first-ever program I have installed that uses Cygwin X-window.
Be careful. When you convert otf font to ttf, FontForge will discard hinting info. Hinting is way of telling the font rendering engine how to fit font boundary to pixel boundary. There is *BIG* difference between displaying font with hinting info and without hinting info.
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You are right about font conversions erasing the hinting. Even with TTF font's that FontForge opens with the hinting intact, if you do any significant edits you will break the hinting code, and then have to recreate it from scratch.
OR MAYBE NOT . . .
As you probably know, like a lot of other portable readers, the underlying operating system in the Sony eReaders is Linux.
Linux based systems typically use a font rendering engine named Freetype, and sure enough, if you check the User Guide for your Sony, you will find an acknowledgement that it uses Freetype.
Because of software patent issues, until 2010, the Freetype rendering engine code was not even legally supposed to use the font's embedded hinting, so to keep things legal, the developers created a very sophisticated auto-hint generator that generates its own hints directly from the font's outlines without using it's embedded hinting.
Since the basic patents covering hinting have
now finally expired, Freetype can now legally use a fonts embedded hinting, but ironically, I have found that sometimes the auto-hinter works better anyway, and many Linux distros that use Freetype just use auto-hinting and ignore the Font's embedded hinting.
So, depending on how Sony has configured Freetype, it may NEVER use embedded hinting anyway.
Before I figured this out, I spent hours and hours figuring out how to reconstruct and optimize the hinting in FontForge and insuring that it was properly embedded into my fonts, only to find that it didn't seem to help much on the Sony.
For example, my NimbusMod font does not include embedded hinting, but was instead iteratively tested to make sure that is was working well with the auto-hinting built into the Sony's font rendering engine.
It's not just NimbusMod, I have found that many other favorite fonts for the Sony, like LexiaDaMa, also seem to lack hinting, and yet work quite well.
A lucky break, because FontForge is about an order of magnitude simpler to use if you don't have to deal with hinting.