
Treatise on Font Rasterisation - adambyrtek
https://freddie.witherden.org/pages/font-rasterisation/
======
andrewcooke
well, i thought this was excellent. sorry it didn't get more votes - thanks
for posting it.

[edit: ha! i changed a setting while reading that, then forgot. i just
rebooted to fix a hardware issue and - wow - this looks way better! all i did
was reduce the amount of hinting used by kde. until i read that article i had
assumed more was better. also, my comment now makes no sense, sorry - i made
that when it appeared to be slipping off the "new" page with just 2 votes (but
i see somehow it arrived on the front page...).]

~~~
adambyrtek
You're welcome. I found this article while looking for a credible source that
could explain the fonts.conf settings, as most of the information about that
on the web is either plain wrong, or just lacking any kind of justification.

------
hop
It will be nice when the technology advances to make full size computer
screens with >300dpi screens like the iPhone4. Pixels and heavy font tricks
will likely be a relic of the past.

~~~
CamperBob
Actually we were there several years ago -- do a search on the IBM T221
monitor. I think they were about $15,000 or so, and they only made them for a
couple of years. I imagine it's pretty awkward to use one in Windows, since so
many UI elements don't scale in any sensible way.

~~~
mambodog
Clearly resolution independent windowing & UI widgets are also a prerequisite,
and as this would likely require most existing applications to be extensively
modified I don't see either Apple or Microsoft rushing to get it done.

~~~
adambyrtek
According to a Wikipedia article[1] Microsoft did a good job when it comes to
resolution independence, and Apple also makes progress on that front.

"Microsoft Windows has supported DPI aware programs since Windows Vista and
allows user specified DPI settings for the windowing interface. [...] The
Windows Presentation Foundation from Microsoft, and consequently, WPF
applications, are also designed to be resolution-independent."

"Apple has included some support for resolution independence in recent
versions of Mac OS X, which can be demonstrated with the developer tools
Quartz Debug, which includes a feature which allows the user to scale the
interface."

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resolution_independence>

------
skittlebrau
Related "classic" article:
<http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/>

------
mtk
here's another treatise from a while ago by maxim shemanarev, author of the
AGG library:

<http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/>

edit: sorry i missed skittlebrau's mention of this, regardless, maxim has a
lot of interesting articles on his site if you are interested in geometry
rasterization

~~~
roel_v
AGG really pushed the envelope, it's a shame that Maxim has seemed to have
vanished off the face of the earth. Cairo has a different focus and I wonder
if it will ever get to the same level of control and performance, given that
it tries to target many different backends.

------
ZeroGravitas
Apparently the Google Web Font team have been doing something to make the
unhinted, open source fonts they provide display better on Windows machines,
though I've not seen anywhere that they detail exactly what they do.

Probably something quite clever since the same team actually removes the hint
info for platforms that don't use it to save download time.

