Re: [Freetype] bytecode interpreter makes antialiased text worse?!

[Vadim Plessky]

On Wednesday 09 October 2002 12:17 pm, David Turner wrote:
|  Ben Liblit wrote:
|  > Red Hat 8.0 ships a GNOME2 environment that uses FreeType 2.1.2 for most
|  > text rendering.  (Yay!)
|  > Their standard FreeType build *disables* the bytecode interpreter.
|
|  Yep, that's standard. A few distributions still enable the bytecode
|  interpreter by default, like Debian. I've been told that Suse does
|  it too (anyone could confirm this ??)

No, both SuSe and Mandrake disable it.

|
|  I'm pretty certain that they'll soon drop it due to recent improvements
|  in the auto-hinter :-)

I expect mandrake to put FT-2.1.3 into /unsupported folder (on ftp servers), 
so it will be available for upgrade for all users.

|
|   > While text is rendered antialiased by default,
|  >
|  > non-antialiased text clearly looks a bit lumpy without the bytecodes to
|  > help smooth things out.
|
|  That's also true. I haven't optimized the auto-hinter for monochrome
|  rendering just yet. There is anyway little doubt that carefully-hinted
|  TrueType fonts will always generate better mono output with the bytecode
|  interpreter turned on.
|
|  > I decided to rebuild my FreeType with the bytecode interpreter enabled.
|  > Non-antialiased text looks much better.  However, I was surprised to
|  > observe that antialiased text looks significantly *worse*.
|
|  That's not very surprising. Most of the hints found in TrueType fonts
|  are optimized for monochrome rendering only, and this creates some rather
|  surprising effects when anti-aliasing at small pixel sizes.

Yes, I can confrim this, too!

|
|  Many popular fonts have this problem, this includes Arial,
|  Times New Roman, Verdana, Georgia, etc... And I doubt you'll see an
|  AA-optimized version of these fonts freely available.

Even non-AA-optimized versions of those fonts were displaced from MS web site 
on Aug.12, 2002.

|
|  (It seems that Windows XP includes fonts optimized to better display
|    with ClearType, but these are not the ex-free "Web fonts" that once
|    were distributed on Microsoft's sites)

>From my experience, ClearType is not good at all !..
FreeType is much better (even without sub-pixel rendering) :-)

[I will give comments to th erest later]

-- 

Vadim Plessky
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