[MPlayer-dev-eng] Font hinting in libass

[Jindrich Makovicka]

On Tue, 24 Apr 2007 22:34:44 +0400
Evgeniy Stepanov <eugeni.stepanov at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.

I'd prefer an option, or at least the possibility to set the hinting
from within the VO, so vo_gl and vo_sdl can enable hinting.

-- 
Jindrich Makovicka