[Development] about the Cocoa/Freetype fontengine

[Nikolaus Waxweiler]

>> compromises for black and white glyphs), yet so many people 
>> complained about blurry fonts that Microsoft lowered the gamma 
>> correction in IE to make the fonts look blacker.
> 
> Which confirms my claim that most users will give higher priority to 
> on-screen legibility than to design veracity. Very understandably 
> so.

Alternative explanation: people complain when something they know
changes. Nobody could stand to use Macs if bitmap fonts were the
pinnacle of on-screen legibility.

> IIRC Microsoft played into that themselves when they promoted Times 
> New Roman to the de-facto standard variable-width font.

Yep :)

> I'm guessing you can find almost any number of combinations of fonts 
> that bite when displayed next to each other.

True if you use bytecode hinting. Now use hintslight/the autohinter for
everything. Suddenly everything harmonizes much better because the same
hinting strategy is applied consistently to everything. This is the
reason I pushed for hintslight as the default in GNOME and FontConfig 
after Ubuntu used it for years.

> I'm also pretty certain that people like "Bohomil" who spend/t hours 
> tweaking fontconfig files do so in part to reduce such differences.

You can't fix fonts having different hinting strategies, unless you
rewrite the hinting.

>> Should be easy to find out. Filename ends with ".otf", you're most
>>  likely looking at a CFF font (see e.g. Cantarell).
> 
> I have lots of OpenType fonts that probably just contain TrueType 
> inside.

Find out in FontForge, or if you have fonttools installed, look for
"CFF" in `ttx -l font.otf`.

>> And I think it is asking for users to complain about different 
>> looking fonts on their platform.
> 
> Seriously? Anyone complaining about something they asked for is 
> begging not to be taken seriously.

Lemme reword that: users of apps whose developers switched font engines.

> I'm curious to see if I'll develop a preference.

Maybe you find that you prefer what you're used to :)