Hi Phil, > > I have a problem related to fonts. As you might know, I'm hacking on the > > OpenJDK challenge thing and try to implement an external toolkit/J2D > > pipeline based on external and internal interfaces etc. Progress is > > pretty good so far, as can be seen here: > > > > http://kennke.org/blog/2008/04/16/caciocavallo-prototype/ > > > > Is the text on that "Swing Activity Board" what we are supposed to be > looking at?
I suppose yes, depending on what you think you are supposed to be looking at ;-) It is a straightforward little Swing application (kindof the Classpath pendant to the SwingSet2 demo, only much smaller and less demanding). > > However, there seems to be a problem related to fonts. To me, it looks > > like they are not hinted properly. My TextRenderer implementation is > > very simple and straightforward: > > > > The only control for font hinting is how the rasteriser - freetype - is > compiled. > If your copy of libfreetype is built with hinting turned off, then that > will make a difference. I did not change compilation of FreeType in OpenJDK. I am using the same FreeType that is used when I choose the default AWT/J2D implementation, and there it looks just fine. > The usual compensation for that is antialiasing the text. Yeah, I was thinking that too. But how do I get the rasterizer to give me antialiased pixels? All I can see in my TextRenderer implementation is 0 and 255 pixels, nothing between, even if I force the text AA rendering hint to ON. > Still that looks pretty grotty, maybe there's something more to it, like > a font that > wasn't very amenable to auto-hinting, although it looks like a fairly > straightforward sans font, I am using the FreeSans that ships with Ubuntu. When I show that in the Gnome fonts viewer, using B+W, it doesn't look too good either, but still much better than in my demo. Other fonts I tried (Bitstream Vera, DejaVu and some more) looked even worse. > I notice the text in the window manager title bar that presumably comes > from your desktop > may be the same font and its greyscale and looks like it would also be > grotty in B&W. Possible. As I said, that FreeSans font doesn't look too good without AA (as does none of the free fonts I suppose, because of the lack of TrueType hinting in normal FreeType distributions). BTW: Is the FreeType in OpenJDK compiled using the autohinter or using the (patented) TrueType hinter? Anything else I should have a look at? Cheers, Roman -- Dipl.-Inform. (FH) Roman Kennke, Software Engineer, http://kennke.org aicas Allerton Interworks Computer Automated Systems GmbH Haid-und-Neu-Straße 18 * D-76131 Karlsruhe * Germany http://www.aicas.com * Tel: +49-721-663 968-0 USt-Id: DE216375633, Handelsregister HRB 109481, AG Karlsruhe Geschäftsführer: Dr. James J. Hunt
