Re: FT2 design question

[Werner LEMBERG]

> I'm probably just phrasing purely. How would you approach the design
> of a WYSIWYG tool, i.e. one which's printed output aims at coming as
> close as possible to the onscreen appearance?  Would you try to use
> the same font for both (and with font I now mean not only the set of
> attributes but same set of glyphs together with auxiliary tables)?
>
> What if one is bitmap only (screen) and the other completely vector
> oriented (say, a plotter)?

If the font has some hidden logic (to make it usable on an abstract
level), you *must* use the same font.  I can't see an alternative.

To do this, the screen resolution must be large enough to make the
results legible -- having some anti-aliasing is a must probably.

It may help if the font has been designed to render nicely on screens
also (which is not the rule but rather the exception since the
development of such fonts is quite expensive), i.e. it works at
resolutions of about 75dpi also.  Nevertheless, you must not use
special screen font features (e.g. non-linearly scaling metrics) to
avoid different line-breaks.

In summary, WYSIWYG is an illusion IMHO with today's screen
capabilities.  The screen resolution should be at least 150dpi; then,
with anti-aliasing, you no longer have to think about the whole
problem at all since most of the fonts will do a good job.

BTW, it is quite interesting that the size of displays has increased
considerably, but the resolution is still identical to that of good
old VGA.


    Werner