Re: Fonts and readability

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

"Sergey I. Panov" <sipan@mit.edu> writes:

> On Thu, Jan 13, 2000 at 09:17:39PM -0500, Owen Taylor wrote:
> > 
> > Derek Simkowiak <dereks@kd-dev.com> writes:
> > 
> > > 	I was looking at msdn.microsoft.com (hey, I was curious) and I
> > > found an article on fonts and readability, and Microsoft's new "ClearType"
> > > product:
> > > 
> > > http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/backgrnd/html/cleartype.htm
> > > 
> > > 	It's poorly written (the author takes three pages to say that
> > > monitors are lower res than books, and it reads like the guy works in the
> > > MS marketing department) but it covers some interesting details about
> > > pixel resolution, fonts, and making things more readable.  I'd be
> > > interested to know if any of this technology can be integrated into Gnome
> > > (or, more likely, into X).
> 
> I ran into that "ClearType" thing when I was wastin one of my days
> reading T1, TT, and OpenType documentaion (mussing the idea of using
> available TT fons in the gnome-print ides directly). My impression was that
> "ClearType" is a proper fonts + a proper scaling + an old good antialiasing.
> Am I wrong?

There also is some "technology" to increase apparent resolution 
by exploiting they layout of pixels on an LCD screen. Sort of like
hi-res mode on an Apple 2...
  
> > To put it briefly, what X needs is well constructed, free set of
> > scaleable fonts covering all the common scripts in a few styles.
>  
>  MS freely downloadable TT fonts collection? Is there some licensing
> problem? They do cover all the common scripts and styles.

 - They aren't modifiable
 - They aren't redistributable
 - Microsoft could pull them from distribution at any time.

Also, I don't believe that they have CJK fonts as part of their
collection, but I could be wrong.

But in any case, you can't build a free system where the essential
component is a proprietary product from a company competing against
free software.
 
> > And it needs a decent font API.
> 
>  What's that? Font metrics availability to the applications?

 - Better metrics - this includes lots of stuff - kerning tables,
   positioning information for diacriticals, baseline adjustment
   information.

 - Better ways to deal with subset fonts. It's painful to get the
   information about what characters are in a subset font
   out of X currently.

 - Better font matching capabilities

 - Ability to deal with alternate glyphs for characters.

 - Ability to draw rotated glyph strings.

Those are a few of the things that come to mind. Anti-aliasing as
well, but that's more of a rendering-model problem.

Regards,
                                        Owen