[ltp] font rendering

[Richard Griffith]

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