(Oops, sorry, forgot to add [email protected] CC. Forwarding)

Thanks for the answer, Werner!


> > It basically states (and very convincingly illustrates) that the
>  > secret to very good font rendering is to use only vertical pixel
> > alignment, [...]
> >
> > 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?
>
> The `light' autohinting mode disables horizontal hinting (and in case
> of italic fonts).
>

The thing is, I can't achieve something similar to what
http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/truetype_test_02_ft.zipachieves
(under wine). The horizontal hinting may be disabled with light
autohinting, but it seems as though the characters are still processed
one-by-one and put together as opposed to the whole text being processed,
which means that smooth scaling is still unreachable. The individual
characters are still snapped to the horizontal grid, making them look
uniform, but distorting the text as a whole:
http://habreffect.ru/files/6c6/6d0735cde/autohinting-light.png The first two
lines are supposed to be a different size, yet they are exactly the same.

I don't know which component of the font rendering chain is responsible for
this, but I haven't found a single piece of software which would allow the
use of the software rasterization algorithm in question. Each text processor
seems to be doing diffrently, yet all have their drawbacks.

Koffice is the most abysmal:
http://habreffect.ru/files/7d9/4e2deaef0/koffice-fonts.png

Openoffice and AbiWord are better, but still they achieve the scalability by
using variable spaces between characters:
http://habreffect.ru/files/252/7943c2ed9/openoffice-fonts.png
http://habreffect.ru/files/d4c/0fb34a6c4/abiword-fonts.png

And yet, as the article illustrates, it's easy to achieve perfectly scalable
fonts, which would benefit WYSIWYG word processors very much. I just don't
understand it.

Victor
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