Re: [Freebangfont-devel] Optimizing

[Deepayan Sarkar]

On Wednesday 13 November 2002 07:26 pm, Michael Steidley wrote:
> > C. Regarding the Bengali Glyphs
> > ===============================
> >
> > Michael was going through some of the fonts, and he reported to me that
> > the fonts
> > were good, but some more optimisation could be done (Likhan's size can be
> > reduced
> > by around 25%, for instance).
> > Michael - waiting for you to speak on this :).
>
> Please take a look at this to see what I mean about optimizing the glyphs:
>
> http://www.ariesgraphics.net/freebangfont/optimized.html

One observation regarding this. I tend to edit my fonts in Pfaedit (and as far 
as I know, there are no other truetype editors on GNU/Linux). Pfaedit stores 
glyphs as cubic splines (aka postscript) internally, but truetype needs 
quadratic splines. So, when simple and fairly well-optimized postscript 
glyphs in Pfaedit are converted to truetype, it uses some approximation of 
cubic splines by quadratic splines which invariably loses any elegance the 
original cubic outline had. In particular, the number of control points 
increases by a lot.

Deepayan