Xft subpixel rendering patch

[Russell Shaw]

Keith Packard wrote:
> On Sun, 2005-08-28 at 20:47 +0200, Soeren Sandmann wrote:
> 
>>I don't think it's fair to call them terrible hints. The font does
>>contain a table that tells the rasterizer not to antialias at small
>>ppems. If you antialias it anyway, you get what you deserve ...
> 
> I suppose, but counting on the anti-dropout code to ensure legible
> glyphs seems a bit lazy to me. Times New Roman is one of the only
> "professionally hinted" fonts I've seen with this particular problem.
> 
> You should see what the outlines look like when hinted at small pixel
> sizes, it's a bit comical and at the same time amazing that the
> monochrome rasterizer generates usable output from them.
> 
> -keith

I've been thinking of a new outline font format that deals with hinting.
The idea is that at small size (low resolution), the text is resized
by integral pixel sizes in height. Any desired pixels can be switched
on or off by a per-character lookup table, indexed by font size. Above
a certain size, there is enough resolution to not need hinting, so the
font is sized continuous (non-discrete) and the lookup correction
table is not used. Would that solve all hinting problems?