Re: [Freetype] RE: Freetype digest, Vol 1 #265 - 1 msg

[Antoine Leca]

Hi Nir,

Nir Rostoker wrote:
> 
> My intention is to display Korean fonts on a real time application, and font
> sizes of hundreds of Kbytes are too much for me.

OK, I can understand that.
However, I am not a font specialist, neither are the vast majority of
the people here. You probably will get more precise and useful answers
from real professionnals (newsgroup comp.fonts come to my mind).

> To your knowledge can I display normal Korean fonts ( I mean fonts that are
> used normally by Korean on Electronic display ,like Cellular phones or PDAs)
> with normal TTF file size (like western ones) around 50-100K ?

I would say, probably yes, if without any Hanja (the Chinese characters).
As far as I know, such a font is not widely available on the web. I may
be proved wrong, and in fact I welcome anyone well informed on this topic
to prove me wrong.

> As far as I understood the Sora font will not be seem normal to most
> Korean people ?

Yes.

> Do you think of an option for a light TTF file that will seem like normal
> Korean font ?

Creating it. This is not as complex as it may seem; however, there
are two pitfalls:
- first is that TTFs are very nice at low ppem (resolution), but only
if sufficient time and work is invested in creating the hints;
- second is that using such a font requires a "usable" version of
a TrueType interpreter; if you plan to use Freetype for that, you should
buy a license of use from Apple (read www.freetype.org/patents.html).

Also, even if free or near free tools are available, they are nothing
near in quality from the professional tools like Fontlab...


Hope it helps,

Antoine