That might well be the original motivation, but note e.g. ttfautohint development 2011 or so onwards [1] intended to strip hinting programs and replace them with the output of the autohinter because so many fonts have awful hints.
[1] Not sure exactly when the ttfautohint work started, but both Microsoft and Google donated money to it in 2011.
It’s true that autohinting is nowadays the norm but I’d be more generous to those old fonts as they were aggressively hinted for black-and-white rendering. It’s not until ClearType was enabled by default in Windows Vista c. 2007 that those old hints became undesirable.
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FreeType did auto-hinting because Microsoft held patents on some of the hinting engine instructions. These finally expired in 2010.
That might well be the original motivation, but note e.g. ttfautohint development 2011 or so onwards [1] intended to strip hinting programs and replace them with the output of the autohinter because so many fonts have awful hints.
[1] Not sure exactly when the ttfautohint work started, but both Microsoft and Google donated money to it in 2011.
It’s true that autohinting is nowadays the norm but I’d be more generous to those old fonts as they were aggressively hinted for black-and-white rendering. It’s not until ClearType was enabled by default in Windows Vista c. 2007 that those old hints became undesirable.