Re:Font Combiner – improvements to free web fonts
by emily_b on Sunday November 03, 2013 @12:19PM
(#6664019)
I don't know if Google strip hinting, but that sounds broadly accurate. Font Combiner makes use of ttfautohint as part of hinting types B and C, with slight modifications where a subset omits character 'o'. Hinting and truetype instructions make little difference to OSX and others.
And for platforms that do use it I thought it ran ttfautohint to generate it, which sounds incredibly similar to what these guys do.
Relatedly, Google fonts also has sophisticated subsetting options which this page claims as an improvement over Google's offering.
edit: relevant links
http://www.freetype.org/ttfautohint/index.html
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QTX1lU97z08 (27 minutes in for stripping hints on non-windows requests)
http://googlewebfonts.blogspot.com/2011/04/streamline-your-w...