[Devel] postscript fonts, freetype and mozilla, redhat's great fonts

[Michael Cardenas]

Hello everyone. First off, let me say thank you for your amazing
work. I've always admired the freetype project.

I'm working on improving the quality of font appearance in lindows
os. Specifically, I've been trying to examine what redhat has done, as
their fonts look just amazing. Again, way to go owen. The baseline I'm
starting with is the debian freetype package, as lindows os is based
on debian.

I see that in mozilla, redhat8 seems to be using the font Nimbus
Roman No 9 L. Looking at the output of xlsfonts -ll, I see that in
redhat 8, this font is being rasterized by freetype, but in lindows
os, it is being rasterized by X. So my first question is, how does one
get freetype to rasterize and anti alias postscript type 1 fonts?

Secondly, I tried applying the lighthint patch, to provide the
FT_RENDER_MODE_LIGHT, but it doesn't seem to make a difference. Is
there a configuration file that I need to change in order to use this
mode to get better shapes?

I've tried using the luxi fonts, and I wouldn't call them pretty, so
I'm guessing there's a lot of room for improvement in the way that
debian packages freetype. I've also tried some proprietary bitstream
fonts, which look better than the luxi series, but still look moch
more fuzzy than redhat's fonts.

Of note is that debian packages freetype with the bytecode interpreter
enabled. Also, we're using xfree86 4.2.1-3 from debian.

Any help you can give me would be greatly appreciated. I'm trying to
get our anti-aliased fonts to look good enough to use by default,
which we don't now.

Thanks,

  michael

-- 
michael cardenas       | lead software engineer, lindows.com
hyperpoem.net          | GNU/Linux software developer
people.debian.org/~mbc | encrypted email preferred

"It is as hard to see one's self as to look backwards without turning around."
- Henry David Thoreau