Re: Hinting regression in Ubuntu 23.04

[Werner LEMBERG]

> I'm curious if they have motivation to make bad fonts with no
> hinting?  does it somehow help when/if anti-aliasing is turned on?

The relation between cost and benefit is no longer given: The
percentage of people who actually use a low-DPI screen together with
fonts rendered as monochrome is very near to zero.  Adding B/W hints
to fonts is *extremely* expensive because only a very small group of
experts is able to do it properly.

Apple ships OSX without hinting support since more than ten years,
IIRC.  The resolution of hand-held devices is normally higher than
200dpi – at such high DPI values it is simply not possible at all to
*see* the effects of B/W hinting.

For special devices that use very low DPI values (say, a small LCD
screen of a terminal at a supermarket counter) it is more
straightforward to create a set of bitmap strokes for the smallest
ppem values, doing 'normal' hinting for larger sizes.


    Werner