[MPlayer-dev-eng] Font hinting in libass

[Evgeniy Stepanov]

On Sunday 22 April 2007 03:47, Artur Zaprzala wrote:
> When I implemented TrueType support for MPlayer (subfont-c) a few
> years ago, I observed better results without hinting, so i left it
> disabled. The reason is that the glyphs when rendered are fitted
> (hinted) into video resolution and then scaled to screen resolution. I
> don't know how hinting would survive sinc interpolation, but scaling
> by video overlay makes it ugly.

I checked it with several fonts, and it seems that when native hinter is used 
before scaling, resulting text looks really bad. This is true even for Times 
New Roman, which, I think, should have a decent hinter.
On the other hand, autohinted text after scaling usually looks almost the same 
as if it was not hinted at all. This is especially true with light 
autohinting. It probably means that native hinter is the strongest one, 
therefore it makes more damage to text.

I'm inclined to set FT_LOAD_NO_HINTING by default, because -vo gl, it seems, 
is not that popular, and hinting does much more damage with low resolution 
videos, than its absence does when rendering in screen resolution. I could 
also add "ass-hinting" option with four integer values:
0 - no hinting,
1 - light autohinting,
2 - normal autohinting,
3 - native hinting.