"Richard L. Hamilton" wrote:
> > Anyone keen to fix this for Indiana? :)
> 
> Historically, CDE on Solaris at least used to favor the Lucida fonts, which 
> are
> AFAIK specifically designed for on-screen readability, and are also I think
> available in scalable versions.  Not sure how that would stack up with
> expectations compared to your example of using Vera Sans instead.

It will only help partially. I spend a huge amount of time developing
font downloading code (which fetches a TrueType or PS Type1 font and
converts it to PS Type1/3/42 that a printer can process it) for the
Xprint project - during that time I realised that the main quality
problem is that the FreeType2 library has lots of rounding errors in the
TrueType and generic outline processing code and turns off the TrueType
bytecode interpreter (for (IMO hypothetical) patent issues) which
degrades the quality even further. The problem is partially "hidden" by
anti-aliasing but comparing the "mono" output against the original
BitStream font module in Xsun shows serious quality problems with
smaller font sizes.

IMO it may be better to keep the BitStream TrueType engine for
OpenSolaris - but AFAIK this isn't possible since it's closed-source...
;-(

... as alternative I suggest to enable at least the TrueType bytecode
interpreter in libfreetype2 since this will improve the quality for many
of the commercial fonts (which usually have bytecode embedded for better
quality).

----

Bye,
Roland

-- 
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