Around 17 o'clock on Jun 7, Rolland Dudemaine wrote:
> If so, wouldn't it be a good idea to make the default fonts true type ?
> Then, the fonts would look good by default. And "basic" people would not
> complain about this ugly font problem anymore...
Good TrueType fonts are not freely redistributable; we simply don't have
any good fonts to give you, as much as we'd like to.
Building a beautiful font is a lot of work, and we're lucky to have several
of those donated by Adobe, Bigelow & Holmes, Bitstream, and IBM. Display
these fonts on a 1200dpi printer and they look great. Display them on a
100dpi monitor, and they don't look so great. The problem is in the
translation to the low resolution on the screen.
Apple designed the TrueType font format to include a sophisticated
"hinting" system -- essentially a programming language for adjusting the
shape of the glyphs in low resolution environments to improve the
legibility of the glyphs.
The fonts that we ship today don't take advantage of this hinting mechanism
and instead rely upon the automatic hinter provided within FreeType.
Oddly, the carefully hand-generated hints provided in the best TrueType
fonts generally produce better looking results than the font-independent
automatic hinter provided by FreeType.
There are other issues in the US surrounding Apple patents on this
particular TrueType technology; many distributions of FreeType 2 disable
the interpreter for fear of these patents, so in that environment, the
the highest quality TrueType fonts with extensively tuned hints will look
no better than the essentially unhinted fonts included in XFree86 today.
There are hints in Type1 fonts, but they aren't quite so instructive,
they're more like guidelines to be interpreted by a knowledgable expert.
The Adobe Type1 rasterizer generates pretty good looking results even from
these vague hints, the FreeType Type1 rasterizer doesn't do so well. Even
still, TrueType hints appear clearer on the screen (to my eye) than Type1
fonts rasterized by the Adobe Type1 font engine.
One easy thing to do in this situation is to disable hinting fonts that
don't have good hints -- the results on the screen are often an
improvement in apperance, even while they are significantly less sharp as
most of the glyph edges aren't located at pixel boundaries.
Xft2 allows you to do this in the font configuration file, simply add
<match target="font">
<edit name="hinting" mode="assign"><bool>false</bool></edit>
</match>
to your ~/.fonts.conf file (or /etc/fonts/fonts.conf for a system-wide
effect).
But, the best results (for me) are gained by downloading the freely
available (as in beer) web fonts from MS and rebuilding your freetype
library to enable the bytecode interpreter.
Keith Packard XFree86 Core Team HP Cambridge Research Lab
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