[cairo] Text scaling and hinting

[Robert O'Callahan]

On Wed, 2005-05-04 at 22:32 -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
> If you want to do animation, you want to turn off hinting. The only
> other option would be to have some sort of complicated system of
> transitions between different hinted endpoints, and I don't see that
> as feasible with the general state of font rendering technology
> we have available.

We can't know in advance whether the author is going to do some kind of
animation. Turning off hinting everywhere is no good. Redoing layout at
every animation frame is not feasible or desirable. We can offer some
sort of CSS hint that authors could use to turn off font hinting for
animations, but this is the Web, so lots of authors won't use it and we
need to do as well as we can.

Given those constraints, assuming a fixed transformation matrix and
doing the best rendering job we can with those metrics still seems like
our best solution to me. We can use the first matrix used to render the
element as its reference matrix, so only animations will be penalized.

Rob