Re: Anti-aliased font support library ready

[Philip Armstrong <phil kantaka co uk>]

additional followup:

If you want to see why truetype antialiasing is awful, take a look at

http://www.kantaka.co.uk/freetype.png

and compare with

http://www.kantaka.co.uk/type1.png

The truetype was rendered with the freetype library, whilst the
postscript font was rendered with t1lib.

There are several problems with the truetype font:

1) The truetype standard says that letters *must* be aligned on pixel
boundaries. This leads to the nasty 'jumps' in the apparent weight of
the font as you increase the size. 

2) The small pixel sizes look nothing like the larger ones.

By comparison the postscipt font, which is sub-pixel antialised looks
*far* beter, and is readable down to the smallest point sizes ( if you
can focus that small :) Of course, this also means that the font looks
good on low-res devices like handhelds and tv screens. Psion and palm
et al are missing a trick by not anti-aliasing their displays...)

There is at least one significant problem with the postscrit, which is
that it appears to 'fade out' as you get to smaller point sizes. I
think this is because t1lib is not using the hinting/scaffolding
information contained in the font to 'fill in' the font at small point
sizes.

enough anyway, this is probably off-topic for gtk-devel list, though I
think proper font handling should be a longer term goal of the free
software community in general. Is anyone working on a suitable X
extension? Time for another project?

phil (still missing his acorn font renderer :(  )

-- 
nosig