Fwd: [ft] Font rasterization

[Victor]

(Oops, sorry, forgot to add address@hidden CC. Forwarding)

Thanks for the answer, Werner!

 

> It basically states (and very convincingly illustrates) that the

> secret to very good font rendering is to use only vertical pixel

> alignment, [...]

>
> So, let me reiterate my main inquiry: is it possible (with freetype)
> to use vertical hinting and pixel alignment only, leaving subpixel
> rendering to take care of the horizontal aspect?

The `light' autohinting mode disables horizontal hinting (and in case
of italic fonts).

The thing is, I can't achieve something similar to what http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/truetype_test_02_ft.zip achieves (under wine). The horizontal hinting may be disabled with light autohinting, but it seems as though the characters are still processed one-by-one and put together as opposed to the whole text being processed, which means that smooth scaling is still unreachable. The individual characters are still snapped to the horizontal grid, making them look uniform, but distorting the text as a whole: http://habreffect.ru/files/6c6/6d0735cde/autohinting-light.png The first two lines are supposed to be a different size, yet they are exactly the same.

I don't know which component of the font rendering chain is responsible for this, but I haven't found a single piece of software which would allow the use of the software rasterization algorithm in question. Each text processor seems to be doing diffrently, yet all have their drawbacks.

Koffice is the most abysmal:

http://habreffect.ru/files/7d9/4e2deaef0/koffice-fonts.png

Openoffice and AbiWord are better, but still they achieve the scalability by using variable spaces between characters:

http://habreffect.ru/files/252/7943c2ed9/openoffice-fonts.png

http://habreffect.ru/files/d4c/0fb34a6c4/abiword-fonts.png

And yet, as the article illustrates, it's easy to achieve perfectly scalable fonts, which would benefit WYSIWYG word processors very much. I just don't understand it.

Victor