[Dvipng] Re: Blurry rendering

[Jan-Åke Larsson]

Frigo wrote:
> While playing around with the math rendering of MediaWiki, I
> noticed that dvipng blurs the equations unlike dvips + gs +
> convert (especially the upper line of the equal sign). I've
> tried different settings of --gamma and -Q, but I got even
> worse quality. How can I achieve similar results as with dvips?

Try the latest version of dvipng, and make sure it links to (a recent
version of) FreeType. That will fix the problem. The problem you are
seeing is that in the (relatively) low resolution common in these kinds
of images, sometimes a line gets split onto two pixel rows at much lower
ink thickness. Recent versions of FreeType provide means of correcting
this, libt1 and PK fonts just aren't good enough in this respect.

If you cannot link to FreeType, the value '--gamma 1.4' or 1.5 improves
things a bit. You can also try experimenting with the resolution, using
-D117 instead of -D120 for example, but the exact results depend on the
font, YMMV.

Regards,
Jan-Åke