Re: [PATCH] Font antialiasing v2

[Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko]

>> Mixing compression and font engine will make the code more complex and
>> bug prone. It's better to put compression layer below the font and
>> make font subsystem unaware of it. The only exception is if
>> compression takes advantage of knowing font structures.
>>     
>
> My aim was to make it more practical to have full Unicode fonts of a
> decent size.  Compressing the font would greatly decrease the disk
> space required, but if the entire font file was compressed using, for
> instance, GZip, then (generally speaking) the entire file would
> have to be decompressed to use the font.  This would probably make it
> far too slow to display the GRUB menu when a few fonts were loaded.
>
> In my thoughts on font compression, there are a couple of opposing
> factors:
>
> - Compressing too little data produces poorer compression since there
> is less redundancy to eliminate.  Consider the extreme case of
> compressing each glyph by itself with GZip.
>
> - Compressing too much data means that more time is spent
> decompressing glyphs at runtime that will not be used (in general, a
> small fraction a Unicode font would be used at once in GRUB).  Consider
> the extreme case of compressing the entire font as a single unit with
> GZip.
>
>   
This issue should be handled at compress time by choosing to compress by
blocks of desired size. This way font layer doesn't need to care anymore.
> By compressing blocks of characters, where each block contains a number
> of characters that represents a compromise between too little data for
> good compression on disk and too much data for wasted time decompressing
> unused glyphs, good compression and good runtime performance can be
> attained.
>   

-- 
Regards
Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko

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