Re: [Devel] 2.1.0 and mozilla 1.0rc1

[Vadim Plessky]

On Wednesday 24 April 2002 08:34, James H. Cloos Jr. wrote:
|  I just upgraded mozilla to 1.0rc1, as packaged by SuSE (ie with the
|  xft2 support compiled in).  The previous release had a bug (very
|  similar to a bug in early releases of Xft aware xterm, FWIW) leading
|  it to choose bold and/or italic fonts as base fonts.  As such, I've
|  not done much testing of its ft2 support until now.  It is dynamically
|  linked against /usr/lib/libfreetype.so.6 which in my case is currently
|  2.1.0 with bci on.  I've also configued mozilla to turn both autohinted
|  an unhinted off, so it will use the bci.
|
|  It mostly looks great.
|
|  I found one interesting thing.  I use georgia at 15px as the main text
|  font.  Georgia italic at 15 pixels has an interestingly rendered Y.
|  The upper right arm of the Y is entirely gray, and is essentially
|  invisible at normal text size.  (As a side note, some of the 'white'
|  px to the right of the gray px are in fact coloured fe,fe,fe.)

Dear James,

Problem with diagonal stems &  FreeType is very well known.
But in fact it's not FT problem but *hinting* issue.
Some fonts have better hinting (I refer here to TT fonts), some fonts have 
really terrible hinting.
All said is related to FT with ByteCode Interpreter turned On.

As about PostScript fonts and PS Auto-Hinter (which appeared in FT since ver. 
2.0.6):
- PostScript Type1 doesn't support hints for diagonal stems at all. Therefor, 
Latin letters: X x Y y M K k W w V v A 
and Cyrillic:  Й й И и Х х Д д Л л У у Ж ж М м Я я
are affected by this fact.

I don't know solution for this (yet). As it was proposed some time ago on this 
(or <freetype>?) list - it can be good idea to add special @diagonal@ hint to 
FT auto-hinter. As hints generated by FT used by FT only so far, it will not 
create incompatibilities with other software/libraries.
But rendering will be greatly imprroved.
 
|
|  As a png is is only 522 octets, so I've included it below, blown up
|  forty times.

-- 

Vadim Plessky
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