2011/11/28 Santhosh Thottingal sthottingal@wikimedia.org
Hi,
I spent some amount of time today on learning about hinting and its behavior, played with fontforge, compared Lohit Tamil with other Tamil and Malayalam fonts which is having not so bad rendering in windows.
Autohinting is not giving expected results for Indic fonts, since they are yet to write algorithms for that- http://www.freetype.org/ttfautohint/ I checked with Hiran about the possibility of Manual Hinting. He told me that , that requires advanced skills in typography and he never seen it anybody done for Indic fonts except a typographers work for Sinhala.
Yes, manual hinting is pain. It takes lots of time.
We need to do it for each character and for each size i.e. 8pt, 10pt, 12pt.
4-5 bugs on liberation fonts hinting is pending from long time, so i need to dig it some time.
If we are using upstream Lohit, I understand that we cannot get good results. Lohit family fonts are not well tested for Windows too(Pravin, Correct me if I am wrong).
Yes, windows was never high priority for lohit, but some people use it for Windows as well though i have not heard anything regarding Lohit Tamil yet.
By studying the behavior of other fonts, I have one solution with me, I did an Embolden Transformation on font by 25 units(http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/Styles.html) and I see that the hinting problem is disappeared and font is more good for reading. The font is more dark now.
Yeah, we need Bold font for each script in Lohit upstream. see bug for Devanagari https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=648350
But auto bold will not work perfectly, we need some manual intervention by font designer to make it consistent with Regular Lohit fonts.
Srikanth, Pravin, please confirm this by the screenshots attached. let me know if there is any improvement.
Definitely image looks better that earlier broken thing. Let me know once you applied it.
Regards, Pravin Satpute