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Re: [fonts] TT instructing/hinting



Meor Ridzuan Meor Yahaya wrote:
Gregg,
Although I'm by no way expert in hinting, but i think the way you
describe the hinting process is a bit misleading. The reason is I
think a hint program will almost always tied to a font, maintly
because the hint program will always refer to a control points, which
will differs form one outline to another. Thus, it does not make much
sense to seperate the hint program from the outline.

True technically. I make the rash assumption that hint programs for similar letterforms will have certain common patterns. The idea being not that one could use the same set of hint programs for multiple fonts, but that one could take bits and pieces and strategies from one set of hints and modify them as needed to instruct another font. So for that one might have separate licensing. (Consider the view that a TT Instruction stream - bytecodes - is to a high-level TT hinting language as machine code or Java bytecode is to a high-level programming language. So one could release "sourcecode" to various hinting programs with some kind of LGPL so they could even be used in proprietary fonts. Maybe that's completely impractical, but it's kinda fun to think about; I won't know until I do some experimenting and research.)

Anyway, features that you describe for a hinting program, I think the
program that fit's is Microsoft Visual Truetype.

Luckily, I don't have a windows machine. ;) I've looked into VOLT and VTT, but something deep deep inside of me gets very queasy at the thought of using MS software if I'm not getting paid to do so. /) Anyway I'm still learning Fontlab and just discovered its TT instruction capabilities. Its previewer is quite nice. I don't know if I like their high-level instruction language, though.


Another program that might suite your need is mensis. It is being
develop by Geroge Williams, the same person who develop fontforge.
Mensis is strictly for editing truetype instruction, and it does

I'll take a look. There's also TTIComp. And I got this crazy idea of writing an emacs major mode for editing and compiling TT "assembler". It wouldn't be very hard to write a TT instruction compiler to make the bytecode stream; inserting the instruction stream into a font would be a little harder, but not exactly rocket science. Hey, if they can do it in Python, why not Elisp?


thanks,

gregg