On Wednesday 28 August 2002 6:19 am, Keith Packard wrote:
|  Around 18 o'clock on Aug 27, Ken Deeter wrote:
|  > it seems for asian fonts at least, if there are embedded bitmaps, they
|  > should be used even if antialiasing is enabled. (i think this is what xp
|  > does, not that we should always replicate xp)
|
|  That's hard to judge.  I'd say that the question of whether you want to
|  use the embedded bitmaps is essentially the same as to whether you want to
|  use anti-aliasing.  Well hinted Western fonts are essentially equivalent
|  to embedded bitmaps. so if you like the appearance of non-AA text, you'd
|  probably like it for all fonts.

Do you refer here to TrueType fonts, and FT rendering with Bytecode 
Interpreter enabled? (which is not the case with Mandrake and SuSE 
distribution, they have to turn it off by default)

As about PS T1 fonts - SanSerif fonts are rendered o.k. (with AA) even at 
small sizes.
Problems start with Serif (Roman) fonts - Times New Roman, Palatino, etc.
I have tried 7 different varaiants of Times (Times New Roman, CG Times, BT 
Dutch 801, Newton, Nimbus Roman and couple of not-known clones), none of them 
is rendered o.k. at small sizes (FT 2.1.1, or FT 2.0.9/Qt/KDE3) ...
I even tried to adjust hinting for *all* of them (manually) - but this doesn't 
sound as good solution either. **

My solution so far (for application/user requiring Serif  font) - to use 
outlines better tuned for low-res. rendering.
I think this one suits this purpose:
http://freetype.newmail.ru/misc/Journalnaya.zip

Serifs are much thicker than in Times, they (almost always) get at least one 
pixel in rendering, and some lines (stems) which are diagonal in Times, are 
horizontal/vertical in this font.
Worth trying :-)

**  And TrueType hinting is not a solution at all.
I have tried with FontLab4 demo to auto-hint several glyphs from Nimbus Roman
Results are discouraging:
G - 21, g- 30 /instructions per glyph/
S - 26, s- 31
X - 25, x- 27
Cyrillic:
� - 28, �- 32
� - 30, � - 36
� - 27, � - 33
� - 28, � - 34

And results (of auto-hinter) are *not ok* in many cases!
Manual rehinting of thos eglyphs will require, probably, 40 to 50 bytecode 
instruction per glyph, and will take several days! (suggesting that you 
already know *how* glyph should be hinted..

It seems to me that solution can be is to render glyph at much higher size 
(factor of 5x, I guess), and than use some non-liner filtration.
But this of course requires a lot of processor resources.
So it probbaly should be done once, and pre-rendered gray-scale bitmaps 
embedded in OpenType (Adobe CFF) font.

|
[...]
|  Keith Packard        XFree86 Core Team        HP Cambridge Research Lab
|
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