Sayamindu Dasgupta
Also, if you using the autohinter of FreeType2 in SuSE, you'll need to disable it for the two fonts, since autohinter does not work very well with Indic fonts. To do so, add the following lines to /etc/fonts/fonts.conf:
<match target="font"> <test name="family"> <string>Mukti Narrow</string> </test> <edit name="hinting"> <bool>false</bool> </edit> </match> <match target="font"> <test name="family"> <string>Likhan</string> </test> <edit name="hinting"> <bool>false</bool> </edit> </match>
If the autohinter were really bad for Bengali fonts, I think it would
be better to disable it for all Bengali fonts and for each
font separately. Like this:
<match target="font">
<test name="lang" compare="contains">
<string>bn</string>
</test>
<edit name="hintstyle" mode="assign">
<const>hintnone</const>
</edit>
</match>
But actually I have the impression that these fonts look better
when the autohinter is used. Can you please have a look at
these two screenshots:
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/projects/m17n/misc/mukti-narrow-hinting-false.png
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/projects/m17n/misc/mukti-narrow-hinting-true.png
The one without the hinting has more smeared out gray, therefore it
looks a bit bolder but considerably more blurred.
Maybe the reason why the hinted version looks better is that
the SuSE freetype2 package has the patch from
http://www.kde.gr.jp/~akito/patch/freetype2/2.1.7
applied which improves the hinting results for CJK fonts a lot.
Quite possibly this helps for Indic fonts as well.
When you wrote that the autohinter doesn't work well for Indic fonts,
you were talking about an unpatched freetype2, didn't you?
--
Mike FABIAN