[ft] Bad emulation of boldness.

[Daniel M.]

Hello everybody.

Generally, X renders .ttf fonts exactly as Windows does, but there is
the following problem: usually .ttf file for a particular font contains
a number of styles: Regular, Bold, Italic and Bold Italic, so that when
application uses bold font, it uses Bold style instead of Regular. But
when .ttf doesn't contain Bold style, for example, and bold font is
required, boldness is emulated. Now, Windows emulates boldness perfectly,
but X does it really badly. For example, see the difference between Windows
and X in bold font rendering in the following screnshots:

Windows: http://xt.nm.ru/monaco-win-10pt_1.tif
Linux: http://xt.nm.ru/monaco-lin-10pt.tif

The font used in a screenshot is Monaco (.ttf version), but there
is the same problem with other fonts which don't have Bold style
"built-in", for example Ariel Mono and others.

I use libfreetype 2.2.1 (Ubuntu Edgy).

Is it possible somehow to improve the situation?


Daniel.