Re: fonts for gfxmenu, help needed

[Michal Suchanek]

2009/11/30 Michal Suchanek <address@hidden>:
> 2009/11/30 Qianqian Fang <address@hidden>:
>> Michal Suchanek wrote:
>>>
>>> Aestetics is relative but uniform stroke width is not.
>>>
>>> Yes, I suspected it would not be a common character, my character
>>> table does not list a meaning for it.
>>>
>>> However, similar issue can be seen with the 刀 character in the
>>> microhei_24px and microhei_32px rasterization. In fact, the stroke
>>> width is almost inverted in these two rasterizations although they are
>>> supposedly the same font.
>>>
>>
>> I agree with you that the CJK autohinter is far from perfect.
>> It does a much worse job in smaller sizes.
>
> If it does decent job on larger font sizes then perhaps we could
> render a large enough font and rely on bitmap fonts for smaller sizes.
>
> I guess I should also install some more fonts and try to convert them
> to bitmap in Fontforge.
>

I tried rasterizing Arphic fonts in Fontforge and I am disappointed.

First, fontforge sucks at this kind of task. There is no reasonable
way to select multiple glyphs, save a Unicode range. You can choose
them one by one or drag by mouse. The semantic of drag operation is
different on selected and non-selected glyphs. Pressing Esc to get out
of menu or clicking somewhere deselects the glyphs again with no way
of re-selecting the glyphs I was working with. Terrible user
interface.

The results of rasterization are also disappointing. The UMingTW font
seems somewhat reasonable at 48 and 64 px (but not 52 px so it's
probably just a matter of skimming through more glyphs to find some
examples of terrible rasterization).

In UKaiTW there is no problem with the 刀 character because its strokes
are slanted enough to not get turned into a line with width-stepping
but there is a problem with 口 and similar glyphs. The problem are
near-vertical or near-horizontal lines that get rasterized quite
poorly. Glyphs with multiple vertical or horizontal strokes often get
strokes of different widths because some of the strokes get rasterized
on the pixel boundary while others do not.

The same issues can be seen in the outline view without antialiasing,
and antialiasing greatly improves the glyph shapes, and at least for
me it improves readability as well.

So to me rasterizing to bitmaps looks like a dead end. We either need
grayscale support or vector support or take only the limited set of
fonts which are manually drawn as bitmaps.

Thanks

Michal