Re: T1 font support in xgps

[Wim Oudshoorn]

NOTE:  If you reply directly to me, please use
my home e-mail:           woudshoo@xs4all.nl
instead of my work email: woudshoo@sctcorp.com



Philippe C.D. Robert wrote:
>
> And while we are at it, the webpage says it is slow, so could you
> please give us some benchmark results? Maybe using GSBench can be a
> start, there is one test which uses font rendering.

Well, I did not actually test it.
However, the implementation is just a quick prototype
that renders roughly this way:


String --[T1lib]--> image --[mycode]--> RGBA image --...

         ...--[xgps compose bitmaps]--> screen.


Last evening I did a quick test with GSBench.  The results
were roughly:

Xlib font  GSBenc scored   +/- 0.48
T1lib font no AA           +/- 0.21
T1lib font with high AA    +/- 0.19

But is you can see from the description above
the code is not optimized at all.


-----

Peter Cooper wrote:

> Seriously, I like antialiased fonts, but it would be nice if it was
> configurable to only antialias fonts larger than a specified point
> size. (I loathe smallish type being antialiased - IMHO it turns the
> characters into blurry blobs - but large type certainly seems enhanced
> by antialiasing).

It definitely was my intention to make the AA options highly configurable.
It should be possible to determine per (fontname, fontsize) combination
the rendering parameters.

---

William F. Adams wrote:

> I'd suggest the following options to leave open:

> - off (no anti-aliasing)
> - light (only anti-alias angles/curves)
> - heavy (anti-alias all edges)
> - LCD (sub-pixel rendering optimized for LCDs)

> A tall order, I know, but this is a thing I care strongly about.

I also care strongly about fonts (even if I do not exactly qualify
as a font expert).   But I know that my preferences are not
the universal standard of good taste.  So I will leave lot of
options open.
At the moment however.  I just use T1lib to render the font, and
that only supplies you with options

- off
- heavy.

But maybe, some day, we can implement the other two.
And I also have no intention to drop the standard xgps/Xlib
font support.

But I hope this weekend to write a paper with some suggestions
of how to handle the font configuration.


Greetings,

Wim Oudshoorn.
e-mail: woudshoo@xs4all.nl