Hinting for Windows

[sourcegazer]

Need hinting like in 2.030 version for Windows.

[libertypi]

Agree. TTF hinting seems missing after version 2.030.

[pauldhunt]

This is an issue that I will not be attending to in the immediate future. If anyone would like to hint the TTF fonts, I would be happy to incorporate them into this project.

[trinhnhatnam]

Could you add a note about this (using 2.030 TTF on Windows for best look) in README? A lot of programmers like me don't need the lastest character set, but need sharp rendering on Windows machines. For them, 2.030 is best looking.

I recommended this font to others. After trying the lastest, they came back saying that the font didn't look good on their machines like it did on mine, so they moved on. I was puzzled about this, and found out later that I was using 2.030.

[dr-scsi]

@pauldhunt - Is using ttfautohint an option? The description says:

ttfautohint provides a 99% automated hinting process and a platform for finely hand-hinting the last 1%.

If that works, maybe you can even drop the effort for the last 1%. I think it needs some initial work to set up a script, i.e., defining the parameters to ttfhautohint, then run the script and add the fonts to upcoming releases. Does it make sense?

[pauldhunt]

@dr-scsi i will look into it.

[Zorbn]

@pauldhunt If you're still interested in this, I have a repo that uses ttfautohint to hint the ttf fonts. It also uses ttfautohint's Control Instructions to customize the hinting of glyphs that looked better with manual tweaks.

SourceCodePro-Hinter This repo has a hint.py file that requires the ttfautohint executable to be placed next to it in the same directory, then it needs to be run next to an in and out directory, where the ttf fonts are placed in the in directory and the hinted versions are outputted into the out directory. It's pretty basic, so there are other ways of doing this too.

My Source Code Pro fork has hinting integrated into the build.cmd and build.sh, with a folder called Hinter that handles the hinting. The fonts are still outputted to the same target directory that they usually are. That fork has some glyph modifications and other changes, but it might still be useful as an example of adding a hinting step to the build system.

Hopefully this info is helpful in some way.

[cristianadam]

Qt Creator is shipping Source Code Pro as a font resource. We tried to upgrade to a newer version, but had to revert to version 2.0.30 due to "blurry" rendering on Windows.

On macOS with Retina displays version 2.0.30 is too thin, whilst version 2.0.42 is fine 😔