On 20.04.2009, at 16:53, Bèrto ëd Sèra wrote:

> Hi!
>
> At least on Linux I can't imagine why people would like the usual  
> Squeak rendering, I may have a problem with Cuis as far as cut&paste  
> is concerned, but it looks 1 million times better as far as fonts  
> are concerned... Together with Opera and Chromium the usual Squeak  
> way it's got the worst fonts rendering ever. Why?

Linux and Windows users are accustomed to heavily hinted font  
rendering, looking overly "crisp" because lines are snapped to the  
screen pixel grid. The result has little resemblance to the true  
character shape as it would appear when printed on paper, but it's  
what they are used to. In contrast, Apple's and Adobe's font rendering  
is much more truthful to the paper appearance, but looks "blurry" to  
Windows and Linux users.

So it's much more a thing of taste than correctness for what people  
prefer. Here's a pretty nice discussion:

http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/index.html

> I know nothing about char rendering in general, though. Maybe  
> someone will take a second to explain me why certain things look so  
> poor on *nix?


Squeak's default truetype font rendering looks the same on all  
platforms, so it's not a *nix problem. It uses the Balloon2D engine,  
which renders vector fonts into bitmaps using 4x4 oversampling for  
anti-aliasing, without any hinting. The result looks more like the  
Apple rendering, which does not match the taste of many Linux/Windows  
users. And even Mac users usually have sub-pixel-rendering enabled  
which makes fonts look slightly crisper than what Balloon2D produces.

If you prefer the Linux font look, use the Freetype plugin. Well, or  
the Cuis fonts of course.

- Bert -