J.A. Magallon wrote:
On 2002.10.22 Adam Williamson wrote:On Tue, 2002-10-22 at 13:51, Combelles, Christophe (MED, ALTEN) wrote:Does anybody know what is the difference between a good font and a bad font?
(The rendering engine has an important job, but the font is important too.)
I have found that the program pfaedit is included by default in mandrake, it seems to be a very good tool to build fonts.
But is having a good tool enough to build a good font ?
Nope. I don't understand enough about fontography to understand the problems exactly, but a good tool certainly isn't all you need. See the difference between, say, Mandrake 9.0's default "sans" font and Verdana as an example. I *believe* the trickiest part is in tweaking the hinting, but I'm not sure of that.
TeX fonts are very carefully designed (look at it, tex font rendering is
light years ahead of Word or XFree rendering), and for example the vectorial
definition of fonts is different for the same font at small sizes than
at large sizes.
I do not know if freetype could get some hints from metafont...
(or if they did already).
not just the hinting, there is also the kerning, the bit map and a host of other items. ( actually 8 in total) that are required for a good font to function properly at all sizes.
a good app for designing and coding them helps a lot if it can track all these criteria and integrate them seamlessly.
supporting bolding or italics works best if it is in the font description rather than just in the application using the font.
