[Mumbles: I really whish gmail defaulted to "reply all"]
On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 10:25 PM, Vasile Gaburici <vgaburici(a)gmail.com> wrote:
As a little addendum, here's a quote from Adobe's Thomas
Phinney, a
bit further down that typophile thread: "The professional publishing
market seems to have a strong preference for CFF, even if there is no
technical reality behind that."
On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 10:12 PM, Vasile Gaburici <vgaburici(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 8:59 PM, Nicolas Mailhot
> <nicolas.mailhot(a)laposte.net> wrote:
>> In practice you can approximate cubic splines by just cutting cubic
>> segments in many quadratic ones, which font editors like fontforge do
>> automatically, and at the sizes text is typically rendered there's no
>> visible difference.
>>
>> But after years of marketing on the subject some users are convinced
>> transformation to quadratic for fonts designed with cubic splines is a
>> quality loss.
>
> Indeed. I was one that believed there would be a difference, but even
> at 512 display size, I don't see a single pixel that differs.
> Screenshots here:
>
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=312489
>
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=312491
>
> On the other hand, CFF and TFF use different hinting mechanisms, and
> there a visible difference at small (10-12) point sizes, even on
> Windows.
>
> On the TTF vs. CFF issue, Adam Twardoch, one of the FontLab's managers
> (don't let this make you think he's all marketingspeak) has some
> insightful comments here:
>
http://www.typophile.com/node/16695#comment-99516. My summary of his
> position is that TrueType in in OpenType packaging should genrally be
> prefered to OpenType/CCF as an end-user delivery method, all other
> features being equal.
>
> Unfortunately, on Fedora we also have a more complex hinting issue:
> Apple has a patent on TrueType hinting, so TT hinting is off by
> default (there's a Livna package to enable it). Also, most free fonts
> like Linux Libertine store the manually produced PostScript hinting in
> their sfd file (I checked with Philipp), and the TT hinting is
> generated in FontForge just before the TTF is exported. So my guess is
> that the CFF hinting is likely to be better, since it's hand-made. I
> need to do a few more test on this though...
>