Re: Arial looks different in Win7 and Wine

[Peter Grandi]

> This is very strange. I was expecting, that Wine Arial looks the same
> like Windows Arial.

I think that your expectations are very unrealistic because
Arial is a proprietary font and cannot be distributed as free
software. There is a 25 year old version of Arial that is part
of the Microsoft Web Fonts package, but it must be installed in
a special way. I think that this package however is very useful,
because the Microsoft Web Fonts are very well hinted.

If you have a MS-Windows license and software on the same PC you
have the Microsoft Arial and *probably* you can use it under
GNU/Linux legally *on the same PC only*.

Regardless, FreeType probably won't rasterize it in exactly the
same way as the Microsoft rasterizer, at least in antialiased
mode, and probably WINE's own text engine will likely lay out
text in way different way from the Microsoft one. In the same
way as if you put Microsoft Arial in a MacOS X systems.

My guess: it is rather unlikely that text output under WINE will
look identical to that under MS-Windows, even if you use the
Microsoft Arial. It may look closer, or even identical if you
also put under WINE a copy of the original Microsoft glyph and
text rendering DLLs, which is *probably" legal if you have
MS-Windows licensed and installed on the same PC.