Re: [Devel] What should we do for China's Linux National Standard?

[Werner LEMBERG]

> > 1.Support displaying bold, italic, bold italic Chinese fonts.(Now
> > you haven't achieved it.)
>
> I think what Tang means here is to support artifical bold and italic
> functions, which are really desirable for CJK fonts, since most of
> them only have one regular style because of the large amount of
> glyphs.

Italic isn't possible -- even for CJK glyphs, this means different
shapes.  What actually is possible is slanting, and this is trivial by
applying a matrix.  FreeType already provides a function for that.

Emboldening support is available also, but still in experimental
stage.  Have a look at src/base/ftsynth.c, which provides
FT_GlyphSlot_Oblique (which is just a convenience wrapper around
FT_Outline_Transform) and FT_GlyphSlot_Embolden.  Please test!
Problem reports are welcome, fixes even more :-) David has virtually
no time to work on FreeType currently, and I'm also limited due to my
job, children, other projects, etc., etc.

> > 2.When the TrueType font [size] is small, use bitmap font to
> > display Chinese characters.  (Now FreeType can do it, but the
> > English alphabets are ugly).
>
> I think it's because you didn't enable the bytecode interpreter,
> though it will cause the patent issue.  However, even enabling the
> bytecode interpreter, the results of monochrom fonts are still not
> satisfied.  There are many problems in dropouts, kerning and noise
> and I can see it's getting worse after 2.1.7 (more noise).  I think
> the main reason is that freetype is now concentrated in gray mode,
> not monochrom mode.

This is not true.  There have been some improvements even for the
bytecode interpreter recently.  Please download the current
development snapshot and provide rendering examples, and compare the
results with renderings of the same strings on Windows!

Kerning is a completely different problem -- I'm not aware of a single
Chinese font which has kerning (only some high-end fonts from, say,
Morisawa for Japanese have this).  FreeType just provides access to
simple kerning data in fonts (both AFM and TTF); the kerning values
from the OpenType GPOS table must be parsed by a higher-level
application.

And what do you mean with `noise'?


    Werner