Re: [ft-devel] Rendering artifacts

[malc]

On Mon, 26 Jul 2010, Werner LEMBERG wrote:

> 
> > Not sure whether this is a bug, known limitation or something else
> > entirely,
> 
> It's something completely different...
> 
> > but here goes:
> > 
> > ftview 14 LiberationSerif-Regular.ttf [1]
> > 
> > Toggling anti-aliasing ('a' key) makes it obvious that it
> > significantly degrades the quality of some glyphs (the leg of 'k'
> > the slashes in rationals become almost invisible)
> 
> Looking into the font's `gasp' table you can see that the font expects
> anti-aliasing starting with a font size of 18ppem.  In the range
> 9-17ppem, you have to use B/W rendering.  ftview ignores the `gasp'
> table completely ? it's just a diagnosing tool, not a real user
> application, thus it allows switching between AA and B/W rendering for
> comparison purposes.  However, `fontconfig' or similar libraries
> *must* respect this table, otherwise you get bad rendering results.
> 
> In other words: Your bug report is invalid :-)
> 

Well it wasn't a bug report :) That said i first noticed the invisibility
probelm while using seamonkey/firefox/whatever which all rely on
fontconfig. FWIW i tried using Liberation Serif under Vista and it does
AA the glyphs, however the leg of k is perfectly visible.

And while at it, i'd like to point at another interesting case, namely
Linux Biolinum where when using full native hinter and rgb AA the color
fringing is just insane (again under Vista there's no fringing)

And a final remark, i'm using decent CRT monitor and in general do not
use AA at all, it's just that a friend was preaching the ClearType to
me for a while and i decided to try it out, and indeed i was pleasantly
surprised (after trying different AA options here on linux and osx, 
i'd say that the thing doesn't look all that worse than
bitmap/non-antialiased-but-well-hinted fonts)

Sorry for the noise.

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