Re: [ft] Ftdiff and Ubuntu rendering differences

[David Turner]

The differences are completely intentional.

FTDiff uses sub-pixel placement in the "unhinted" rendering mode.
the idea is that the text displays conforms as closely as possible
to the original shapes and metrics of the font.

this is what you'll get by the way on Mac OS X, or even Vista
for WPF/non-legacy applications

This is different from what you'll get on your typical Linux desktop
in "unhinted" mode (i.e. you GEdit samples), because all advances then
must be in integer pixels for the rest of the graphics stack to work
properly... (and fixing this would take a *considerable* amount of work,
and I don't think anybody is interested in doing it at the moment)

that's also why the text layout in GEdit and FTDiff unhinted are also
slightly different.

Hope this helps,

- David

On Sun, 13 May 2007 11:37:46 -0700 (PDT), "Pon" <address@hidden> said:
> 
> Here are a couple of screenshots of Verdana at 13ppem rendered in
> greyscale
> in ftdiff (compiled with FreeType 2.3.4) and Ubuntu:
> 
> http://img248.imageshack.us/img248/2121/verdana1vd3.gif
> http://img248.imageshack.us/img248/2121/verdana1vd3.gif 
> http://img408.imageshack.us/img408/4222/verdana2zv9.gif
> http://img408.imageshack.us/img408/4222/verdana2zv9.gif 
> 
> In the first screenshot the first three columns are ftdiff running in
> Windows XP and the right column is GEdit in Ubuntu 7.04. Why the
> discrepancy
> in transparency levels? Obviously the Ubuntu rendering is most desirable
> in
> this respect. To determine the levels of transparency I just isolated
> each
> column and set the color mode to Indexed in Photoshop, which produces a
> dialog that tells you how many colors there are.
> 
> In the second screenshot the unhinted setting in ftdiff renders different
> instances of the same glyphs differently, whereas the other three modes
> are
> perfectly consistent across the same glyphs. Anyone know what's going on
> there?
> -- 
> View this message in context:
> http://www.nabble.com/Ftdiff-and-Ubuntu-rendering-differences-tf3736008.html#a10457530
> Sent from the Freetype - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
> 
> 
> 
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