[gentium] White artifacts in some characters

[Karl Berry]

Date: Fri, 13 Dec 2024 03:05:53 -0800
From: Victor Gaultney <notifications at github.com>
To: "silnrsi/font-gentium" <font-gentium at noreply.github.com>
Cc: kberry <karl at freefriends.org>, Author <author at noreply.github.com>
Subject: Re: [silnrsi/font-gentium] self-intersecting d, e, g mis-rendered
 (Issue #36)

There were a few reasons why we stopped removing overlap:

- TrueType rasterizers were rarely showing dropouts, so there was little
  need. There were a handful of troublesome shapes that consistently had
  problems - usually where a bar crossed over a counter, as in the
  barred-o. We manually decomposed and removed the overlap permanently
  for those in the source.

- Being thorough with removing overlap would have required decomposing
  all composite characters which would have massively increased the font
  file sizes with little real benefit.

- We couldn't trust the remove overlap in the build to behave
  consistently over time, so we would have had to constantly reinspect
  every glyph in every font on any build we release, which in our full
  set of version 7 fonts (Gentium, Charis, Andika, Doulos SIL) has grown
  to over 111,000 glyphs.

- Overlap is actually a _good_ thing to have in variable fonts, and if
  we ever decide to produce a Gentium variable font we will likely want
  to rebuild many glyphs to add more more overlaps.

I do sympathize with how difficult it would be to remove overlap on the
Type 1 fonts. Given that, and the upcoming expansion of the family to
many more weights, it may be time to end their further development. In
general, Type 1 is a relic of the past and has been no longer supported
in the industry for a while now.

One of the benefits of the TUG work was the additional kerning you
added, however the upcoming version 7 will have even more extensive
kerning that goes beyond what the current Type 1 fonts have. I'll be the
first to admit that the version 7 Cyrillic kerning, for example, might
not be as perfectly finely-tuned as what others have done, but it
supports a much wider range of languages other than Russian.

I hope that helps you understand our purposes and directions.

-- 
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
https://github.com/silnrsi/font-gentium/issues/36#issuecomment-2541202176