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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: Fonts problems
From:       James Richard Tyrer <tyrerj () acm ! org>
Date:       2004-04-05 7:35:48
Message-ID: 40710C54.8050307 () acm ! org
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James Richard Tyrer wrote:

> FreeType2 does whole pixel spacing of glyphs.  But when you print, you need
> to use the DPI of the printer.  This gets complicated since the glyphs need
> to be rendered at the printer's DPI and then displayed on the screen at a
> reduced DPI.  This is the way that WordPerfect works and sometimes the
> screen display doesn't look that good (but it prints "perfectly"). 
> Anti-aliasing should work for fractional pixel spacing and improve 
> things considerably.
> 
> So, the glyph rendering model needs to have TWO DPIs: the rendering DPI and
> the display DPI.  This means that when you change the resolution of the
> printer that the glyph spacing will change slightly in a document (if it is
> being formated for printing that is).
> 
> This assumes that FreeType2 and the PostScript RIP (GhostScript) will both
> render the fonts the same at a given DPI (the printer's DPI).  I don't 
> know if this is a possible problem but IIUC you can specify the line 
> length in a PostScript file so there is a fudge factor (this is what is 
> being used now to produce the larger spacing).  The ultimate solution is 
> something like Keith Packard is working on, but that will not be Qt.  It 
> would be nice to see GhostScript that was based on 
> FreeType2/XFT/FontConfig, but that is another issue.

To illustrate this problem, I posted:

http://home.earthlink.net/~tyrerj/files/Document-1.ps

Which will display properly in a PostScript viewer.  It has the two Type1 
fonts embedded.

And the Scribus file:

http://home.earthlink.net/~tyrerj/files/Document-1.sla

For those of you that don't have Scribus installed, I also posted a PNG:

http://home.earthlink.net/~tyrerj/files/Document-1.png

I think that if you compare the PS and PNG files you can see the problem.

I also note that Scribus finds all my fonts and displays them correctly. 
Could this technology be adapted for KDE? :-)

To see the problem more clearly, try the same with KWord.  The fonts are 18 
point Helvetica and 18 point Arial MT.  When you print to a PS file from 
KWord and look at it in a PostScript viewer, the lines will be longer.

--
JRT

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