[Freetype] Re: [Render] Arial ttf - bad rendering of some glyphs

[Vadim Plessky]

On Thursday 12 July 2001 14:05, David Turner wrote:
|
|   There are great chances that these hints were specifically written
|   for monochrome rendering, not anti-aliased one.
|

Yes, I think you are right.
Windows disables font smoothing <14pt, so it's hard to compare FreeType with 
AA and Windows's TT rasterizer generating Black&White pixmaps.

|   (note that on my Win98 machine, the text always appears monochrome,
|    not anti-aliased, at 11 pt/96 dpi)
|
|   Arial isn't actually the only Microsoft font that shows this kind
|   of descrepancies with the high-quality anti-aliasing performed by
|   FT2, which uses an analytical algorithm. For example, the "z" of
|   Times Italic doesn't show any diagonal due to improper hints at
|   some relatively small point sizes..
|
|   There is nothing that can be done to solve this specific problem,
|   unless you change the hints within the fonts. Another solution is
|   to use the auto-hinter, but results are rarely as pleasant as the
|   original (and I'm working on this btw)

I have tried auto-hinter (well, after upgrade to FT 2.0.3 I found that *all* 
TrueType fonts where looking rather ugly, after all I realized that I need to 
enable TT interpreter, now I have it and fonts look nice...), and I think 
that it's better for me to stick to TT hint interpreter, or to PostScript 
Type1 fonts. (which do not have this licensing issue)

Well, I am very much keen to improve fonts and do manual hinting for them.
Unfortunately, I am not aware of any tool which allows TT hinting, but I have 
good progress with hinting of Type1 fonts.
I have send link yesterday (Newton, Academy), quality I achieved on hinting 
these outlines I rather good, but there are some oddities with displaying 
these fonts at 11pt and 12pt (96dpi)
Can you pls take a look at that message? (so I will not repeat all details)

BTW: I attach modified picture of *problematic* glyphs, which I retouched in 
KIconEditor.
Can you look at it - modified glyphs/string are separated from untouched  
(default rendering by FT, AA enabled) ny blue line.
Is it possible to enhance FT so that it will produce shades like I did (by 
hand)?
 
|
|   What you can do however, is disable anti-aliasing for small point
|   sizes. You'll get results that should match Windows output (unless
|   you find a really weird bug in FT ;-)

Yes, I tried - it works :-)
I was using FT and TTF fonts already for more than 10 months, and I never had 
any problem with Arial.
But with recent upgrade to XF 4.1 and AA / RENDER enabled for my videocard, I 
started to demand more :-))
I like a lot how fonts look like at 8pt-13pt with AA enabled, but some of 
them (in particular, Arial, Times New Roman) have some problems.
Garamond and Book Antiqua render very well with AA, there is a clear 
advantage of using FT instead of Windows TT rasterizer here.

|
|   Note that, the "bad hints" problem also appears often when trying
|   to render a font with different resolutions in X and Y. The
|   auto-hinter is even capable of beating the truetype interpreter
|   in these cases, how weird :o)

Great! :-)
|
|   Regards,
|
|   - David

-- 
Best Regards,


Vadim Plessky
http://kde2.newmail.ru  (English)
33 Window Decorations and 6 Widget Styles for KDE
http://kde2.newmail.ru/kde_themes.html
Do you have Arial font installed? Just test it!
http://kde2.newmail.ru/font_test_arial.html

arial-ttf-rus-modif.png
Description: *modified* rendering