[ltp] font rendering

[Antiphon]

On July 2, 2004 06:57 pm, Richard Griffith wrote:
> Hartwig, Thomas wrote:
> > thank you, this helps me turning off antialiasing in the right way. I
> > have set GDK_USE_XFT=0 before starting mozilla to turn it off.
> >
> > But my main problem is when I have turned it off, the TTF-fonts look
> > very ugly.
>
> Hi Thomas,
>
> This is pretty far off of the Thinkpad focus, but here is a quick
> overview. Those nice microsoft fonts (like Arial, Tahoma, Verdana, etc)
> look good at typical screen resolutions on Windows because of hinting, a
> series of programmed instructions that can influence almost any
> characteristic of the rendering. These fonts have been meticulously hand
> tinted by the masters of the art. The problem is that Apple, one of the
> co-owners of the truetype technologies, has several patents on specific
> byte-codes (hinting instructions) which are sufficiently broad as to
> make any implementation of their respective functions patent violations.
> As a result, even though a clean room implementation of a very
> compatible font rendering engine exists, distributing it entails risk of
> legal action. To visually compensate, most efforts have been focused on
> antialiasing, which involves rendering at larger sizes, where the
> hinting corrections become less significant, and then reducing the size
> to create a grey scale like version which keeps the overall proportions
> correct at the expense of sharpness when viewed close up.
>
> If you really want to know more, you might check out the Freetype
> project at http://www.freetype.org/  The mailing list archives are a
> treasure trove of information, and you'll find the XFT and Moz
> developers discussing issues and strategies from time to time. Just
> remember, these guys put in a lot of effort to make font rendering as
> good as it is, so out of respect, do your research before blurting out
> questions.
>
> -Richard


My advice would be to just download the latest version of freetype2 and 
compile it from source. Most distros automatically enable the hinting but the 
ft hinting isn't as good as other OSes'. You'd have better luck just trying 
the stock Freetype which has hinting disabled. Freetype used to be poor at 
rendering antialiased fonts but it has been significantly improved thanks to 
some excellent rendering code written by David McGill(?) in 2003.

As an example, check out some of these screenshots from my desktop. In the 
second shot, I visited Looky which uses Verdana as its default font.


http://www.kde-look.org/content/preview.php?preview=1&id=11670&file1=11670-1.png&file2=&file3=&name=Emerald+Colour+scheme

http://www.kde-look.org/content/preview.php?preview=2&id=7919&file1=7919-1.png&file2=7919-2.png&file3=7919-3.png&name=KDE+3.2++alpha1