TTF/OTF packaging thoughts?

[Vasile Gaburici]

[Mumbles: I really whish gmail defaulted to "reply all"]

On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 10:25 PM, Vasile Gaburici <vgaburici at gmail.com> wrote:
> As a little addendum, here's a quote from Adobe's Thomas Phinney, a
> bit further down that typophile thread: "The professional publishing
> market seems to have a strong preference for CFF, even if there is no
> technical reality behind that."
>
> On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 10:12 PM, Vasile Gaburici <vgaburici at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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...
>>
>