[ENH] Anti-aliasing type support & FreeType 2.0 beta plugin(very beta)

Henrik Gedenryd Henrik.Gedenryd at lucs.lu.se
Sun Mar 12 09:28:56 UTC 2000


Stefan Matthias Aust wrote:

> From the names, I'd guess that
> 
> Humanst521 BT Bold.font.gz
...
> 
> are Bitstream fonts as for example included on the Corel Draw CD ROM.  That
> Bitstream fonts again resemble Monotype's Gill Sans and Linotype AG's Optima.

I noticed the resemblance too, and found the Bitstream origins (hey, they
even left the 'BT' tag in place). I didn't know about the Corel CD
connection, but that explains it. Strange that no one has had them removed
yet. A good rule of thumb is that good quality and matched weights implies
that it is from a commercial foundry.

>> I wonder if some simple anti-aliasing might not improve non-hinting
>> rendering sufficiently for these purposes, at least at 12 point.
> 
> 
> On 12pt, they look blurred and I'd get a headache looking on them for more
> than a couple of minutes.  Furthermore, depending on the kind of font, the
> fonts show uggly peaks.

Like I said before, with SPR they are acceptable even at 10 pts or so, but
not for extended use.

> 
> PS: Hinted fonts are a must in these small sizes IMHO.  Modern screen TTFs
> may even contain embedded bitmap glyphs for small point sizes so it might
> be even useful to support this, too, or, as an alternative, have one
> primitive in Squeak for direct access to the platform text drawing code and
> a the choice to use either Squeak's bitblt or that primitive to render text.

FreeType 2.0 provides builtin support for embedded bitmaps (in TT fonts I
assume), but I haven't done anything with it. It should be very simple to
do, as it parallels the outline support very closely, and so would require
minimal changes on the Squeak side. Since no changes are required on the FT
side, all it takes is that someone will have to figure it out and get it to
work right. 

Henrik






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