Re: Replacement suggestions for Century Schoolbook?

[Werner LEMBERG]

>> Beg to differ, too.  A `web font' is essentially a font suitable
>> for a computer display with a (quite) low resolution.  In
>> particular, such a font contains hints to intentionally distort the
>> glyph shapes, making them render fine on such devices.
>>
>> Lilypond fonts and its other graphical objects like slurs don't do
>> this.  It looks extremely ugly if you get `crystal clear' rendering
>> of a display font like Arial (or probably even an embedded bitmap
>> for the given PPEM value), while the rest of the score appears
>> fuzzy.
> 
> That means that we probably should be focusing about how we can get
> reasonable hinting for Feta.

Hmm.  It would mean that we get good rendering results only at some
discrete values, namely where stafflines have (a) a thickness of an
integer multiple of a pixel and (b) where the distances between the
five staff lines are an integer multiple of a pixel also.  Sub-pixel
rendering doesn't help a lot for staff lines, so this is quite a
strong physical limitation IMHO.

> Tablets and/or electronic ink are becoming increasingly important
> players in music.

Fortunately, the resolution of hand-held devices increases rapidly.

> Now Feta has the advantage of following traditional music type
> shapes, and those are designed for low resolution anyway as stamping
> with a type does not really allow for integrated hairline shapes:
> fine lines have to be etched separately.

Yes, at the very beginning of my work on the Feta glyphs I took some
measures to ensure good rendering results at low resolutions.  It
would probably be easiest to add embedded bi-level and gray-level
bitmap strikes to the feta font.  On the other hand I really doubt
that it is worth the trouble.


    Werner