ttfautohint's goal is a 99% automated hinting process for web fonts, acting as a platform for finely hand-tuned hinting.

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7th January 2015

I've released version 1.3. Besides support for Telugu, there is a new facility for testing parameters of ttfautohint in parallel.

Please read the release notes for more.

7th October 2014

Since yesterday, version 1.2 is available for download. The most important change is a new possibility to fine-tune the hinting process at a low level.

Other improvements are covered here as usual.

7th May 2014

Version 1.1 is now available. The main new feature is support for the Devanagari script – please test!

In case you need hinting for GDI ClearType, you should upgrade to this version, since some bugs related to stem width computation were identified and fixed. As usual, the complete list of important changes can be found here.

27th March 2014

The Windows binary of ttfautohintGUI version 1.00 didn't work standalone, as intended. Please download it again (the new .7z archive has 26-Mar-2014 as the date and a size of 3278316 bytes).

Version 1.0 has been released

Finally, the long-awaited version 1.0 is here! Compared to the 1.00rc1 release, the memory management has been improved to avoid excessive allocation under certain circumstances. Support for symbol fonts has been fixed also.

As mentioned earlier, GDI ClearType hinting is now much better. However, I missed to show comparison images, which I now do. The top and bottom images (showing Ubuntu regular processed with ttfautohint) are the output of an older and the current version of ttfautohint, respectively.

The ugly flat tops and bottoms of round shapes are gone.

11th February 2014

I proudly present the first release candidate for version 1.00! Its main improvement is the use of the HarfBuzz library to handle OpenType features, allowing the hinting of glyphs that don't have an entry in a font's ‘cmap’ table, for example superscripts or small caps. ttfautohint can now hint basically all glyphs of a supported script.

Another improvement is much better GDI ClearType hinting in the range 30-80ppem (approx.), avoiding overly flat tops and bottoms of round glyphs. The list of the remaining changes can be found here.

9th November 2013

Version 0.97 is now available. It comes with new support for the Hebrew script and improved handling of Cyrillic and Greek, which are no longer handled together with Latin. This brings ttfautohint a big step nearer to version 1.0, which is scheduled to be released in the end of this year.

The list of other changes can be found here.

7th August 2013

I'm happy to announce release 0.96. Its main purpose is to fix the ‘exploding outlines’ issue which happens on some printers (see here for more), however, it also contains minor hinting improvements.

The major work on FreeType (integration of a new CFF hinter contributed by Adobe and color support contributed by Google) has been done, so I can now fully return to ttfautohint development. I expect to have the long-awaited support for more scripts implemented until October so that I can announce it during the ATypI conference in Amsterdam.

8th March 2013

Today I've released version 0.95. This is a small maintainance release without major news (see here for more).

Currently, I'm heavily working on FreeType (including payed work) without having much time to continue the development of ttfautohint. I estimate that this dormant phase will end in about two months, so stay tuned!

28th November 2012

This time, I have two issues to talk about:

• Version 0.94 is out. It adds two new options to better control the vertical dimensions of hinted glyphs to avoid clipping on Windows in case the usWinAscent and usWinDescent values from the font's ‘OS/2’ table can't be adjusted (for whatever reasons). As usual, look here for more information.

• In the last twelve months, there was a lot of progress in the development of ttfautohint. However, there is still a large list of improvements I would like to work on so that this tool becomes more versatile and useful. To make this happen I start a new funding drive, and I ask you for financial support!

10th October 2012

Here comes version 0.93, right in time for the talk given by Dave Crossland and Eben Sorkin at the atypi conference in Hong Kong!

On the functionality side, it brings a new option to hint composite glyphs differently, greatly reducing the bytecode size of the created hints. I'm waiting for reports whether this option works for most fonts; in case this is true I'll make it the default. So please test!

The list of other changes can be found here. Among other things, the GUI version of ttfautohint has a new layout (based on suggestions from Frederik Berlaen).

7th August 2012

I've found quite an embarassing bug in the bytecode produced by ttfautohint, causing bad rounding. All users should upgrade to version 0.92.

12th July 2012

Version 0.91 is out! This mainly brings better support for GDI ClearType. For other, minor improvements, please go to this page for more.

7th June 2012

After a long hiatus due to personal reasons, followed by intensive work on the documentation, I'm happy to release version 0.9.

While I was able to significantly reduce the generated bytecode, the GDI issues haven't been solved yet, unfortunately, to be fixed in a forthcoming release. For other, minor improvements, please go to this page for more.

6th April 2012

Thanks to a very generous donation from Extensis WebINK, my pledgie campaign has reached its goal. Kudos to all of you who have donated and supported me!

In a few weeks I'll do a new release; this time with smaller output fonts due to a reduced size of the generated bytecode, and with better support for GDI ClearType.

30th March 2012

This page now uses the Roboto font for display.

Karsten Lücke again provided a static binary of ttfautohint's command line version for OS X.

21st March 2012

Version 0.8 is available.

This release brings various minor improvements; see this page for more.

To whet your appetite: Here is a snapshot of the GUI :-)

5th February 2012

Version 0.7 is available – we have a GUI!

The Qt framework is used to provide a uniform interface for all supported platforms.

Below you can find a link for downloading Windows binaries. If you want to have better installation support (including a package for Mac), please donate!

2nd January 2012

Version 0.6.1 is available.

This release should fix problems with version 0.6; additionally, dropout mode has been activated.

25th December 2011

My Xmas present to you: version 0.6. Thanks to all of you who are still donating!

This version greatly improves handling of composite glyphs. It also implements option -p to pre-hint a font with the original hints before processing it.

19th November 2011

Karsten Lücke provided a static binary for OS X – no need to install FreeType! It was generated under version 10.5.8, but should run with version 10.7 also.

9th November 2011

The Google Web Fonts has contributed an additional $3,000! I have now raised two thirds of my goal!

I hope other corporate font developers, especially those with large font catalogs, who will benefit substantially from this work, will consider making a contribution of a thousand dollars.

I have just released version 0.5, including a Windows binary. You can read the project roadmap here.

18th October 2011

In September we have raised over $2,000 from the public, $7,000 each from Google and FontLab, together with a copy of FontLab 5, and received from Microsoft the Visual TrueType file format specification. This will allow designers to refine ttfautohint's results further using VTT, if I reach my $30,000 goal!

The collected money so far enables me to intensively work on ttfautohint for the next three months. The two main issues I'm going to handle are

• fixing the bytecode to make it work reliably with Apple's TrueType engines (I've already started with that, and I estimate to provide a new release in about two weeks)

• writing a GUI for easier control

In case you have special wishes, now it's the right time to tell me! Please look into the TODO file and check whether your idea is already covered!

Introduction

Werner Lemberg is making it easy for type designers to create web fonts that look great on Windows, with ttfautohint.

Hinting TrueType fonts can be a slow and expensive process, and many fonts lack good hinting totally because they are converted to TrueType from another font format.

ttfautohint solves this, by building on FreeType's autohinting system. It brings the excellent quality of FreeType rendering to platforms which don't use FreeType, yet require hinting for text to look good – like Microsoft Windows.

Across Windows rendering environments today, ttfautohint fonts look best with DirectWrite ClearType enabled. This is the default for Windows 7. Good visual results are also seen in recent MacOS X versions and GNU/Linux systems that do use FreeType for rendering. Work is now underway to improve quality of older Windows ‘GDI’ rendering.

The main part of the project is a code library, which is described in detail in the source code file src/ttfautohint.h. There are utility programs with both command-line and GUI interfaces, ready to use today.

The goal of the project is to generate a ‘first pass’ of hinting that font developers can refine further for ultimate quality.

The animation above shows how the hints created by ttfautohint get applied to the dollar glyph of Liberation Serif Regular at 19 pixels per em, using FontForge's TrueType hinting bytecode debugger. (You can view the image directly to see it in original size.)

Roadmap

The project started in 2010 when Dave Crossland suggested the idea of the program. Werner was able to start development thanks to financial support from the Google Web Fonts team.

He soon produced results that received some warm attention from professional type designers.

Werner is now working full time on the project while seeking financial support from the wider typography community to continue this work.

Hinting TrueType fonts is a very time consuming and expensive process for type designers. Producing high quality hinting for most glyphs in a font, and allowing them to fine-tune the results by hand will simplify the lives of all type designers. This little program is set to improve the quality of web typography!

The TODO file in the source code repository provides an extensive list of things which will be eventually handled in one or another way. Here is a short list of essential items:

• Improve the way you can fine-tune the results – you can control blue zones and other details of the hinting process since version 1.2 (release notes). If you have feedback for this feature, please send an e-mail to Werner Lemberg.

• Add support for more writing systems – since version 1.3 support for Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Devanagari, and Telugu is available. We plan to support 8 more scripts in 2015: Arabic, Bengali, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Sinhala, Tamil, and Thai.

• Add hooks for other tools – to allow smooth integration with various font editors. Some of them already support a direct call of ttfautohint, but more has to be done, especially for fine-tuning blue-zones and the like.

• Emit the actions in the high-level hinting command languages – those used in other tools, such as Visual TrueType (VTT) or FontLab, instead of only emitting final low-level bytecode. This will allow designers to fine tune the results by hand – essential for those tricky glyphs that require intelligent decisions by a human

• Make the library itself installable.

Visual Samples

Vernon Adams helped in providing comparison images, testing the output of various browsers on different platforms. For this purpose, he used his excellent framework for testing browser fonts.

Some of them are shown below. (Two years ago he also did extensive testing of ttfautohint and documented this in detail at his blog.)

You should look at the images without any zoom so that your browser doesn't rescale them.

Ubuntu Regular, Windows DirectWrite ClearType (as rendered by Firefox on Windows 7). Left the original, manual hinting, right the hinting applied by ttfautohint:

Ubuntu regular, GDI ClearType (as rendered by Chrome on Windows 7). Left the original, manual hinting, right the hinting applied by ttfautohint:

Bitstream Vera Sans, Windows DirectWrite ClearType (as rendered by Firefox on Windows 7). Left the original, manual hinting, right the hinting applied by ttfautohint:

Bitstream Vera Sans, GDI ClearType (as rendered by Chrome on Windows 7). Left the original, manual hinting, right the hinting applied by ttfautohint:

DroidSerif Regular, Windows DirectWrite ClearType (as rendered by Firefox on Windows 7). Left the original, manual hinting, right the hinting applied by ttfautohint:

DroidSerif Regular, GDI ClearType (as rendered by Chrome on Windows 7). Left the original, manual hinting, right the hinting applied by ttfautohint:

Finally, here the font files used in the samples above so that you can compare the hinting results by yourself.

Note that the fonts were generated with version 1.00rc1 of ttfautohint (using default settings); they were also manually edited with ttx to change the font names so that it is possible to use the original versions and the versions processed with ttfautohint in parallel.

Matt Wiebe has tested the font VAG Rounded with a very early version of ttfautohint; he presents the results on his blog.

How It Works

A detailed description of the autohinter inside FreeType can be found here. Although these web pages are in need of an update, the basic principles of the autohinting process haven't changed. There is one exception: The autohinter no longer tries to provide good hinting for monochrome rasterization. Instead, it expects anti-aliasing with 256 gray levels, which became standard with Windows 98.

A scholarly paper published in the EuroTeX 2003 proceedings, titled Real-Time Grid Fitting of Typographic Outlines, gives further insight into the autohinting system's inner workings.

In the above links, one aspect of the autohinting process is missing: The various steps performed by the autohinter (called actions) can be described as high-level operations, for example “aligning a given edge to a given blue zone,” or “linking this edge to another one within a given distance.” The ttfautohint library hooks into these actions and transforms them into bytecode routines.

Similar to most TrueType hints, the autohint actions depend on the device resolution. Consequently, ttfautohint walks over a large range of ppem values (8 to 1000 ppem by default) and collects the actions as sets. A typical glyph outline needs three to four sets (covering the whole range), but sometimes more than ten are necessary.

Intentionally, ttfautohint adds hints only along the y-axis. The Anti-Grain research describes some of the reasons behind this decision. While the article is quite old, the mentioned ideas are still valid.

The ttfautohint library contains a copy of FreeType's ‘autofit’ module, reformatted and using a different function prefix, and with slight extensions for hooks into hinting actions. It therefore inherits the same dual-licensing as FreeType; you can choose between the GNU Public License (GPL) Version 2 and the FreeType License (FTL).

Contact

Werner Lemberg (wl@gnu.org) is Technical Lead, and does all the programming. He is a professional classical musician and lives in Vienna, Austria.

Dave Crossland (dave@understandingfonts.com) is the Project Manager, and wrote and art directed the promotional video at the top of this page. He is a professional type designer and lives in London, England.

Andy Ellis (hello@fadeinfadeout.co.uk) designed and produced the promotion video. He is a professional motion graphic designer and lives in London, England.

Download

Current version: 1.3 (6th January 2015)

Binaries

These stand-alone versions of ttfautohint and ttfautohintGUI don't have any dependencies and can be run directly after uncompressing the archive.

Windows
ttfautohint 1.3 (both command line and GUI)

Apple
ttfautohint 1.3 (currently command line only; thanks to Karsten Lücke for creating this – this universal binary for the i386 and x86_64 architectures has been compiled under OS X 10.5.8 and should run with newer versions also).

Source Code and Documentation

The latest source package of ttfautohint, including documentation in HTML, PDF, and text format, can be downloaded either from Savannah or from SourceForge.

The documentation is available online also.

All development takes places within a public git repository; see the repo.or.cz repository homepage for details.

Note: Prerequisites for compiling the library is FreeType version 2.4.5 or newer and HarfBuzz version 0.9.19 or newer; see FreeType's download page and HarfBuzz's download page for more information.

Compile ttfautohint for Mac OS X, including the GUI.

This page is maintained by Werner Lemberg.