font quality (was: Re: Is there any documentation at all about gnome-print)

[Liam Quin <liam holoweb net>]

On Sun, Sep 02, 2001 at 11:42:17PM +1000, Martin Sevior wrote:
> It appears to be one of the biggest current complaints in making about
> AbiWord VS Kword. Our fonts, being the free Type 1's look ugly. I believe
> this is because KDE take full advantage of the truetype fonts stolen off
> peoples Windows partitions. I don't know for sure. I haven't investigated.

This is because the fere Type 1 font renderers suck, not because Type 1
fonts are ugly.

Unfortunately, a patent helpd by Apple also means freetype2 produces
lower quality results than one would want.

Someone working on improving the results of the type 1 renderer in
feretype would probably be a much bigger help than anything else; with
the exception of the Microsoft TrueType fonts, most TT fotns are
generated by converting Type 1 fonts to TrueType automatically, so clearly
there is no inherent quality improvement in the font in that case.

Lee

-- 
Liam Quin - Barefoot in Toronto - liam holoweb net - http://www.holoweb.net/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net www.valinor.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
Author, Open Source XML Database Toolkit, Wiley August 2000
Co-author: The XML Specification Guide, Wiley 1999; Mastering XML, Sybex 2001