Need hinting for good rendering on Windows?

[bvibber]

Wikimedia bug 56364 has some complaints about rendering quality with Autonym font on Windows; it looks like the font doesn't contain hinting information, which Windows' font renderer really relies on for good rendering at on-screen sizes.

Screenshots from that bug reattached here for reference:

[santhoshtr]

I will try adding autohinting to latin glyphs to begin with. But dont expect result better than the text without Autonym font.From the screenshots it is clear that text without any webfonts are also badly rendered.

[Edokter]

But at least they render legible. Windows bashing aside, I think it was a bad decision to use glyphs from FreeSans, which is the worst-rendering of all open source fonts (along with FreeSerif and FreeMono) I have ever come accross, due to the fact they lack any hinting at all. May I suggest you source them from Nimbus Sans L instead (which, ironically, FreeSans is based on)? Nimbus has proper hinting. It may not render picture perfect, but is very legible on Windows, with or without font smooting/ClearType..

[santhoshtr]

Commit 04335d1 added hinting for latin glyphs.

Screenshot of
https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=UniversalLanguageSelector/AutonymFont
using FF22 on Windows XP SP3 with the latest version of font
http://app.crossbrowsertesting.com/public/id1b2af101bb8ef7/livetests/1196568/snapshots/zb68cdfaa35be26924f1
, font size 13px

Please let me know if you see a change. But I will look into alternate font suggestion( may take time).

[Edokter]

Can't see any difference, but it's hard to tell if I can't zoom/scale. 13px happens to be the 'sweetspot' hiding most flaws.

[behdad]

FWIW I've changed the subsetter defaults to preserve hinting.