Font scaling [Was: XML file format - Linux vs Windows]

[Lars Clausen <lrclause cs uiuc edu>]

On Wed, 19 Jun 2002, Ian Britten wrote:
> On Tue, 18 Jun 2002, Lars Clausen wrote:
>> On Tue, 18 Jun 2002, Ian Britten wrote:
>> > I don't want to talk about fonts... :-< (Courier seems to work ok :-/)
>> 
>> Fonts are a sore spot indeed.  We're going to see what using Pango gives
>> us.  If we don't get consistent scaling there, we shall have to do
>> scaling by hand, even if small fonts will look uglier.
> 
> [ Me again... Please CC me if possible ]
> 
> Have you looked at Freetype2?  I think it more directly deals with your
> problem then Pango would (which seems to have lots more than just font
> rendering in it).

We have, and I did in fact make a renderer that uses it.  If you take the
0.90 tarball and compile with --enable-freetype, you can see pretty
antialiased TrueType fonts.  However, I failed to get even that to scale
linearly.  I've tried without hinting and bitmaps, but the scaling is still
odd.  An example diagram is at
<URL:http://shasta.cs.uiuc.edu/~lrclause/Dia/BrownFox.dia>
and a screenshot of the freetype/libart display at
<URL:http://shasta.cs.uiuc.edu/~lrclause/Dia/BrownFox-freetype.png>
The purple boxes are the bounding boxes, which scale linearly.

> Just my $0.02
> (I'll happily answer any questions anyone has - It'd be a small price
> to pay for your great program!)

If you want to fiddle with it, look in lib/font.c and and
app/render_libart.c.  I'm running out of ideas for what to do.

-Lars

-- 
Lars Clausen (http://shasta.cs.uiuc.edu/~lrclause)| Hårdgrim of Numenor
"I do not agree with a word that you say, but I   |----------------------------
will defend to the death your right to say it."   | Where are we going, and
    --Evelyn Beatrice Hall paraphrasing Voltaire  | what's with the handbasket?