Re: [ft] Bad emulation of boldness.

[David Turner]

Hello Daniel,

the problem is in the client libraries using FreeType to render the
text. 2.2.1 provides both outline and bitmap emboldening functions,
and the latter is capable of generating output exactly equal to your
"good" screenshot.

more precisely, the problem is that these libraries only use the
vector emboldening algorithm, which only gives satisfying results
with anti-aliase text.

I would provide a patch if I had time, I recommend you to file
bugs against libXft, Cairo, and probably OpenOffice.org if this
is a big concern to you.

Regards,

- David Turner
- The FreeType Project  (www.freetype.org)



On Tue, 10 Oct 2006 14:10:08 +0200, "Daniel M." <address@hidden> said:
> 
> 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.
> 
> 
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