TTF/OTF packaging thoughts?

[Vasile Gaburici]

On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 8:59 PM, Nicolas Mailhot
<nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net> wrote:
> In practice you can approximate cubic splines by just cutting cubic
> segments in many quadratic ones, which font editors like fontforge do
> automatically, and at the sizes text is typically rendered there's no
> visible difference.
>
> But after years of marketing on the subject some users are convinced
> transformation to quadratic for fonts designed with cubic splines is a
> quality loss.

Indeed. I was one that believed there would be a difference, but even
at 512 display size, I don't see a single pixel that differs.
Screenshots here:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=312489
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=312491

On the other hand, CFF and TFF use different hinting mechanisms, and
there a visible difference at small (10-12) point sizes, even on
Windows.

On the TTF vs. CFF issue, Adam Twardoch, one of the FontLab's managers
(don't let this make you think he's all marketingspeak) has some
insightful comments here:
http://www.typophile.com/node/16695#comment-99516. My summary of his
position is that TrueType in in OpenType packaging should genrally be
prefered to OpenType/CCF as an end-user delivery method, all other
features being equal.

Unfortunately, on Fedora we also have a more complex hinting issue:
Apple has a patent on TrueType hinting, so TT hinting is off by
default (there's a Livna package to enable it). Also, most free fonts
like Linux Libertine store the manually produced PostScript hinting in
their sfd file (I checked with Philipp), and the TT hinting is
generated in FontForge just before the TTF is exported. So my guess is
that the CFF hinting is likely to be better, since it's hand-made. I
need to do a few more test on this though...