> I have very similar concerns for scaling Kanji bitmaps in mozilla > but the Japanese and Chinese useres I've talked to report that > they really like it and I have not had any negative reports. >
I've played with this feature in mozilla as well, and I tend to like it better than the fuzziness that freetype produces. (tho arguably mozilla and freetype both produce fuzzy output) I think it may have to do with the fact that for kanji characters, proportion and uniformity are more important than just line clarity. Ie if a character has three parallel horizontal lines that are supposed to be of equal "thickness", it seems better that these three lines are uniformly smudged rather than one being noticeably thicker or thinner than the other two. I think bitmap scaling tends to preserve the uniformity and proportion that exists in the high res versions, whereas rendering outlines doesn't always maintain these characteristics. (sorry this is hand waving at best... don't quote me, its just my theory for now) Also, nautilus1's antialiased rendering of japanese characters was quite legible as well, if I recall correctly. I don't know what they did there.. The only other thing that worries me tho, is that for really small sizes, like 8 pix, kanji characters are often heavily distorted to fit into that space, sometimes so much so that i don't think any amount of hinting can replicate. And at this size, scaling bitmaps down would just produce a big gray dot i would suspect. _______________________________________________ Fonts mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/fonts
