4 ms·
FreeType did auto-hinting because Microsoft held patents on some of the hinting engine instructions. These finally expired in 2010.
by jahewson 3y ago
FreeType did auto-hinting because Microsoft held patents on some of the hinting engine instructions. These finally expired in 2010.
- vidarh 3y agoThat might well be the original motivation, but note e.g. ttfautohint development 2011 or so onwards [1] intended to strip hinting programs and replace them with the output of the autohinter because so many fonts have awful hints. [1] Not sure exactly when the ttfautohint work started, but both Microsoft and Google donated money to it in 2011.
- jahewson 3y agoIt’s true that autohinting is nowadays the norm but I’d be more generous to those old fonts as they were aggressively hinted for black-and-white rendering. It’s not until ClearType was enabled by default in Windows Vista c. 2007 that those old hints became undesirable.