Re: New GTK+ anti-aliasing patch posted

[Jens Lautenbacher <jtl schlund de>]

Keith Packard <keithp keithp com> writes:

> This is the difference between Type1 fonts and TrueType fonts -- the 
> Freetype Type1 rasterizer doesn't interpret the Type1 hints very well and 
> the result is blurry text at all sizes.  The Freetype TrueType rasterizer 
> does a fine job.  Check out:
> 
> 	http://www.xfree86.org/~keithp/render/textcompare/
> 
> Using 'xmag', you'll see that all of the horizontal and vertical elements 
> are snapped to the nearest pixel.  This avoids the blurry edges seen when 
> using simplistic oversampling to rasterize the glyphs.

Hmm. you really think THAT is a good job? look at the "W"...

(I still think that a carefully crafted bitmap font is much better than
a AA version, as far as readability goes.)

Another thing that I'm not sure about: what does the 
freetype version used by XRender actually use as it's hinter: The
normally-not-enabled-at-compile-time-because-of-stupid-patents 
truetype hinter or the new autohinter module? Last thing I heard was
that the autohinter is still way behind the "real" truetype hinter, so
maybe one could get some better quality this way.

I wonder that there seems to be no information about this anywhere...

        jtl