Around 23 o'clock on Nov 21, yao zhang wrote:
> In terms of bitmap fonts, one thing you may consider is to make it > scalable. (You may mention this somewhere else, I don't remember > for sure.) Interpolated scaling can make the glyphs look like anti-aliased > outline font: at edges, the gray levels change gradually. The > advantage of doing this is 'size' could no longer be a facter in your > matching criterior since all the fonts are scalable now. Just like by > using Unicode, Xft has made encoding no longer a concern (at least for Xft > itself). I will resist adding scaled bitmaps as hard as I can; they're always harder to read than the unscaled versions and represent the worst choice we could ever make. Far better to display them at the closest available size, if bitmaps are all that we have. This makes size not a factor from the applications perspective; Xft matches the nearest available font. Applications already have to deal with font "point sizes" which have been a fiction for a long time, so dealing with fonts of an unexpected size will cause no difficulty. > Thinking along this way, it is even possible automatically generating > glyphs in differet 'slant' and 'weight'. Now the font handling is at > the client side, which opens the door to all these posibilities. I don't > know how much overhead is going to be involved here though. It doesn't seem > to be that much. Just a thought. Xft already has the ability to artificially oblique fonts; with the new library, it is possible to create a rule which applies an appropriate matrix to roman fonts when the application requests oblique (or italic). I've used this to reasonable effect, but as it distorts the hinting mechanism rather severely, use of this is limited to decorative applications and not sustained text. Artificial emboldening is much harder as the outlines must be adjusted which really breaks hinting. > I found it might not be the font to be blamed. For the same font, > different versions of FT2 show different results if hinting is turned on. Yes, if you have a broken version of FT2 with TrueType interpreter disabled, the results of hinting are often worse than useless. As FreeType ships with that disabled by default, and only Debian bothers to fix it, most users are stuck with ugly fonts. Of course, that interpreter can be used freely outside the US where software patents are wisely illegal. It boggles the mind why anyone not crippled by our laws would suffer with such stupidity. Not that I'm bitter. [EMAIL PROTECTED] XFree86 Core Team SuSE, Inc. _______________________________________________ Fonts mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/fonts
