[ltp] font rendering

[Hartwig, Thomas]

Hi Richard,

just thank you very much for your background informations. I did not 
want to blame anyone. I was just unsure if I'm missing an important 
setup thing. ;-)

I appreciate your tips and will have a closer look at Freetype.

Thomas

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