Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
Bad idea to remove hinting. Bad idea to add weight in FontForge before trying the advanced font controls.
|
Look, I will explain this for the last time and stop repeating myself from now on.
Hinting, by its very nature, is for the screens. It does interpolation of the pixels so that glyphs would seem more natural, more like print. Hinting instructions tells the renderer which pixels are to be interpolated. But the screens the hinting is designed for are all geometrically aligned and that is why analysis works and interpolation happens so beautifully.
On the other hand, eInk capsules aren't geometrically aligned, they are like this:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...rocapsules.png (this is from a Kindle)
There absolutely no way hinting that depends on any kind of a geometrical premise would work and there is no system of hinting I know of that doesn't depend on it. For that to happen the system needs to analysis the eInk capsules and the placement of the glyphs on the page, create hinting instructions for every glyph, and do the hinting. All of them on the fly and page-to-page basis. Our eReaders don't have this kind of resources to use effectively yet.
I have no idea why you keep telling that hinting works, that is a mathematical impossibility; anything that works, works by accident.
And about the advanced font controls, it is just a hack. Adding weight to glyphs by automation requires advanced algorithms and analysis. While Kobo's hack works, it messes up the balance. Sometimes a leg becomes thicker, sometimes height becomes uneven, sometimes we lose sharpness... I mean, it is just a fast hack. But adding weight by using algorithms of FontForge (or Glyphs, the one I use) offers much better end results. It might be destructive but no one is forcing you to erase the source.