Re: [Devel] postscript fonts, freetype and mozilla, redhat's great fonts

[Vadim Plessky]

Hello Michael,

On Thursday 16 January 2003 06:42, Michael Cardenas wrote:
|  Hello everyone. First off, let me say thank you for your amazing
|  work. I've always admired the freetype project.
|
|  I'm working on improving the quality of font appearance in lindows
|  os. Specifically, I've been trying to examine what redhat has done, as
|  their fonts look just amazing. Again, way to go owen. The baseline I'm
|  starting with is the debian freetype package, as lindows os is based
|  on debian.
|
|  I see that in mozilla, redhat8 seems to be using the font Nimbus
|  Roman No 9 L. Looking at the output of xlsfonts -ll, I see that in
|  redhat 8, this font is being rasterized by freetype, but in lindows
|  os, it is being rasterized by X. So my first question is, how does one
|  get freetype to rasterize and anti alias postscript type 1 fonts?

You need to comment out Type1 module (in /etc/X11/XF86Config-4) and make sure 
that "freetype" extension is loaded.
Module section should look like  this after all"

Section "Module"
...
#Load "type1"
Load "freetype"

EndSection

|
|  Secondly, I tried applying the lighthint patch, to provide the
|  FT_RENDER_MODE_LIGHT, but it doesn't seem to make a difference. Is
|  there a configuration file that I need to change in order to use this
|  mode to get better shapes?

I haven't found too much difference in this mode (I used GNOME 2.1.4) compared 
to standard anti-aliased fonts.

|
|  I've tried using the luxi fonts, and I wouldn't call them pretty, so
|  I'm guessing there's a lot of room for improvement in the way that
|  debian packages freetype. I've also tried some proprietary bitstream
|  fonts, which look better than the luxi series, but still look moch
|  more fuzzy than redhat's fonts.

>From my experience, well-hinted Type1 fonts are rendered better than badly 
hinted TrueType fonts.
If you need heavily hinted TrueType fonts - you need Arial, Times New Roman, 
Georgia, Verdana, etc. from Microsoft.
Also, Linotype Palatino is very good, IMO.

Luxi or Ninbus/URW fonts in TTF format are of very low quality.

|
|  Of note is that debian packages freetype with the bytecode interpreter
|  enabled. Also, we're using xfree86 4.2.1-3 from debian.


Bytecode interpreter would help if font is well-hinted. And it produces 
terrible results on badly-hinted TTF fonts.

|
|  Any help you can give me would be greatly appreciated. I'm trying to
|  get our anti-aliased fonts to look good enough to use by default,
|  which we don't now.
|
|  Thanks,
|
|    michael

-- 

Vadim Plessky
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