I'm not sure if this is the appropriate place to ask about this, so apologies in advance. I'm starting to draw a TrueType font in Fontlab specifically for greyscale, antialiased screen display. I'm focusing on TrueType because I'm pretty convinced that accurate rendering at small sizes requires a good deal of manual hinting, especially deltas. Currently I'm running Windows XP and after experimenting with its GDI greyscale rasterizer I've determined that it only has 4-bit transparency, ignores kerning and has some strange gamma issues that result in poor light-on-dark rendering. This just doesn't cut it for me, and Vista's new WPF platform seems to be basically cleartype-oriented with greyscale support as an afterthought (it just desaturates the colored edge pixels).
So, basically I'm interested in making the font under the assumption that it will display in some Linux variant and be rendered by Freetype. To that end I installed Ubuntu 7.04 onto a virtual machine and started testing it out. I'm very impressed with how well Freetype renders even unhinted fonts. However, the problem I'm having is that my workflow is rather torturous for testing out my progress. I need XP because Fontlab won't run in Linux and Fontforge only seems to support Type1 hinting. If I'm in Fontlab in XP and I make some adjustments to the font, then to check how it renders I need to generate the font, copy it over to the Ubuntu VM, install into the system font folder and then open Firefox where I have some font testing HTML. To complicate it even more it seems that sometimes I need to reboot the virtual machine in order for Ubuntu to recognize the change in font (I guess running fc-cache might work but that takes rather long as well). My question, then, is whether there is some sort of Linux-compatible Freetype application that will just load a font on-the-fly (without needing to install it to the system font directory) and then let me display some sample text and maybe test out hinting versus no hinting, antialiasing versus no antialiasing, etc. Maybe there is some easier workflow that I haven't thought of at all? -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Fontlab%2C-Hinting%2C-Ubuntu-and-Freetype-tf3724480.html#a10422728 Sent from the Freetype - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ Freetype mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freetype
