Keith Packard wrote:
>
> 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.
Anti-aliased scaled bitmaps are dramatically better than
regular X scaled bitmaps (which are horrible). As you correctly
point out the unscaled bitmaps are more readable than scaled
bitmaps although the anti-aliased scaled bitmap are quite
usable.
If there is a good spread of font sizes available (typically
true for western fonts) then using a "nearly right sized"
unscaled font only disturbs the layout a little and the
unscaled glyphs are more readable.
If there is NOT a good spread of font sizes available
(typically true for CJK fonts) then using a "widely
wrong sized" font may disturb the layout so much that the
application looks very bad (believe me, I have had many
discussions and meetings on exactly this subject). In this
case the modest reduction in glyph readability is more than
offset by the gain in layout. Compare
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=52975&action=view
to
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=52976&action=view
Still, this is all a moot point if we have outline scaled
which looks better than either of the these two choices.
Lets all work toward using outline fonts with or without
anti-aliasing (which Xft does).
--
Brian Stell
_______________________________________________
Fonts mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/fonts
