Apple fonts in 3.7?

Ned Konz ned at squeakland.org
Mon Feb 23 18:36:37 UTC 2004


On Sunday 22 February 2004 11:18 am, Lex Spoon wrote:

> It is the lack of hinting that is the real problem, not the
> anti-aliasing.  Though I agree that without hinting, we do not want this
> to be a default font.
>
> For large point sizes, like in presentations, the fuzziness is not an
> issue at all.
>
> Anyway, what is the underlying technology?  We may be able to improve
> things.
>
> First, some people actually do have the necessary license to use the
> patented hinting mechanism.  Is there an option to turn this on?  Are we
> using freetype?  If so, then hinting is just a recompile away.
>
> Second, freetype includes an "autohinter".  Are we using this or
> anything like it?  If not, this should be another option for
> improvement.

I am working with Arjen's Freetype code right now, and will have something 
soon. The new Freetype2 autohinter is doing a pretty good job, and I think it 
will be an improvement.

The newest version of Freetype <http://www.freetype.org> is not encumbered by 
patents, because of their autohinter (though you can recompile it to use 
patented technology).

It looks pretty good all in all.

By the way, the document 
http://freetype.sourceforge.net/freetype2/docs/glyphs/index.html gives a good 
introduction to a number of typographic and font concepts.

See http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/3192 for an example of using an older 
version of Freetype2 with Squeak.

Of course, we can ignore patents altogether and just distribute bitmap 
(pre-rendered) versions of antialiased TrueType fonts. There has been an 
extension to the BDF format that supports multiple bits per pixel.

From the freetype2/src/bdf/README (with typo):

---
The driver supports an extension to the BDF format as used in Mark Leisher's
xmbdfed bitmap font editor.  Microsoft's SBIT tool expects bitmap fonts in
that format for adding anti-aliased them to TrueType fonts.  It introduces a
fourth field to the `SIZE' keyword which gives the bpp value (bits per
pixel) of the glyph data in the font.  Possible values are 1 (the default),
2 (four gray levels), 4 (16 gray levels), and 8 (256 gray levels).  The
driver returns either a bitmap with 1 bit per pixel or a pixmap with 8bits
per pixel (using 4, 16, and 256 gray levels, respectively).
---

Enclosed are three samples of anti-aliased Freetype/2 output that don't use 
the patented algorithms (using Arial.ttf, probably from Microsoft):

noHinting8.png is without any hinting, and is similar to what we have already.

noForceAutoHinting8.png is using the auto hinting when the freetype engine 
decides it's appropriate.

forceAutoHinting8.png is forcing the auto hinting for all glyphs.

-- 
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com/squeak/


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