RE: [Devel] Re: my experience with 2.1.4

[Turner David]

Hello Everyone,

  Though I'm still way too overworked, Werner asked me to
  answer to this specific thread :-)

> David, thanks for your update. I must say that it's *very* 
> disappointing that your FT_LOAD_TARGET_SMOOTH was not included in the 
> release. I can only  hope that this decision will be reversed in the next
> release.

We have already integrated some of David's improvements into the font engine,
and we're ready to add more of them, as long as we have the time to test them
completely.

This generally involves checking that the new code doesn't to stupid things
with regards to performance or internal consistency, as well as inspect the
*global* result of the improvement. That's because it's fairly easy to come
up with an improvement that will improve the rendering of some fonts, while
ruining that of others. Moreover, we need to check that all character
sizes are consistently improved (an improvement at size 16 against a
degradation at size 12 is difficult to balance).

In short, it's not that we're not willing to accept improvements, it's that
it takes a lot more time to validate them than what you might expect. A
screenshot doesn't tell you the whole story.

> Your comparison clearly shows that in the *_LIGHT mode, kerning is 
> not only bad but *intolerably* bad. 
> 
Boy, you're using strong words here :-) While you're entitled to having a strong
opinion, I'm pretty certain that not all people will have the same feeling than
you do. Don't forget that the "perceived quality" of anti-aliased text is *very*
dependent on the following items:

  - the monitor's quality (i.e. pitch mask, pixel dot size, gamma)

  - the graphics mode being used (yes !)

  - personnal taste

  - the font being used !

Personally, while I do agree that the kerning of LIGHT is worse than SMOOTH,
I also find the stem width imbalance of SMOOTH a lot more annoying on the
PC I'm using here at work. I also know from experience that my feeling will
be slightly different if I switch to a different screen (e.g. better quality,
or LCD instead of CRT, etc...)


> We *need* to fix this ASAP. Believe me, no one 
> having  a slightest idea of good design or readability will take 
> seriously an OS that can display the word "distribute" as it is displayed in 
> the top half of
> 
> > http://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~dchest/rendermodes.png 
> 

Well, you have several options if you can't live with it:

  - disable hinting completely. No more funky kerning and stem widths :-)
    that's what Apple does in OS X and nobody seems to complain

  - install a patched version of FreeType on your system.

  - try to find other fonts that FreeType 2.1.4 hints better.

> And the most appaling is the fact that we DO in fact already have a 
> solution, thanks to David, but that solution is ignored! How 
> can this be "subjective matter" is beyond me - you have no excuse for 
> such bad kerning, AA or no AA, period. We cannot seriously discuss 
> consistency 
> of stem widths until we have such crazy gaps between letters.
> 
> So I urge every developer on this list, please, please, PLEASE enable 
> FT_LOAD_TARGET_SMOOTH as soon as possible _and make it the 
> default for AA fonts_. Sure, it can be improved further, and I applaud David 
> for his 
> continuing efforts, but even now it is light years ahead of what stock 
> 2.1.4 has to offer. 
> 

Sorry, but we're not going to rush for this right now. I lack time to review
David's patch in details. Moreover, there are other interesting inputs from
Japan that I'm trying to integrate as well, and I doubt the two of them will
match 100%. Which means finding some ways in between while performing always
more tests..


Regards,

- David Turner
- The FreeType Project  (www.freetype.org)

PS: I'd like to thank Werner a *lot* for what he did recently !!


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