As far as Truetype rendering goes, I'm working on a patch to do exactly
what you are talking about. For freetype autohint, I think your best
bet is slight-hinting. (It does render fonts with slight hinting in the
Y direction, which is not desirable to some people, but is more
"correct".) Most programs and toolkits respect freetype / fontconfig
settings (although there are a notable few). I'm guessing you will be
happy once I submit my finalized patch to Freetype's Truetype (native)
hinting. It will not do subpixel alignment, which is discussed in the
"antigrain" page, but it will do vertical hinting in the Y direction,
like MS Cleartype, and slight-hinting in the X direction, like Freetype
does already.
I am hoping to get this into Freetype soon... I know that people will
have a good time with it, and it will take off. ;)
On 05/11/2010 02:15 AM, Victor wrote:
Hello!
I apologize in advance if this is not the place to ask this question,
but freetype doesn't seem to have a forum anywhere, so...
I have recently come across a great article about font rendering,
http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/
It basically states (and very convincingly illustrates) that the
secret to very good font rendering is to use only vertical pixel
alignment, which I take means to apply hinting only vertically.
Horizontally, the article suggests to use subpixel rendering -- that
would mean very good scalability and shapes. I have tried many
configurations in an attempt to produce the same result
(http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/text_ft_antigrain.png
is a handcrafted example of what that would achieve), but horizontal
pixel alignment seems to kick in even when disabling hinting
completely. This is evidenced by characters having the same width with
diffrent sizes. For example, if you scale the line
lllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll, its length will increase unevenly:
at first it would change very little and then suddenly make a great
leap. Either that, or that line would seem to have unevenly
distributed spaces between the characters.
I'm wondering if I just can't figure out how to configure it all
correctly, or if the pixel alignment is built in without the ability
to turn it off somehow. Or if maybe it's the creators of web browsers,
office suites or desktops environments don't know how to achieve such
an effect.
So, let me reiterate my main inquiry: is it possible (with freetype)
to use vertical hinting and pixel alignment only, leaving subpixel
rendering to take care of the horizontal aspect?
Regards,
Victor
_______________________________________________
Freetype mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freetype
_______________________________________________
Freetype mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freetype
