libre vs. pro - still a difference?

[akobel]

Dear Juan,

thanks a lot for your incredibly nice font families Alegreya and Alegreya Sans; I hope you enjoy their success!

As Alegreya "libre" is packaged in many Linux distributions these days and available on both Google fonts and via huertatipografica.com, folks (e.g., those over here) wonder if

• there is still a distinction between the "pro" and the "libre" version,
• there is a functional difference between the OTF and the TTF version,
• and, if so, which is the "de facto" reference version?

All I could find is more or less random rumours: e.g., that the libre used to have less variants than pro, or that, apparently, at some point only the TTF version had hinting support. Plus, the "pro" version from huertatipografica.com is bit-identical to version 2.007 from the Github repo, and doesn't mention "pro" in the OTF. Finally, I'm not sure whether the 2.008 should be the definitive version these days, or rather the 2.007 which is tagged as "latest".

Could you provide some clarification here?

[juandelperal]

Dear @akobel Yes! Sorry for that. I just tagged 2.008 as the latest release. The Pro version isn't available anymore. However the new libre version is better than the former Pro. Even though in the url still says 'pro', in our website we have the libre version available instead (we kept the uri for avoiding broken links). Thanks

[akobel]

Thanks @juandelperal for your quick response.

Maybe you can clarify one more thing: As far as I can see (no font expert here, just an avid user),

• both TTF and OTF contain the same kerning pairs (which apparently used to be the main difference between pro and libre?),
• the OTFs seem to use the (original?) cubic curves, whereas the TTF is a conversion to quadratic curves (due to the format's restrictions), and
• TTF has hints thanks to ttfautohint.

So, as long as the rendering backend does some autohinting by itself (in particular FreeType, which apparently uses the same algorithm as ttfautohint if there are no explicit hints in the font), the OTF should be strictly preferred, correct?