Re: [Freetype] Grey characters

[Werner LEMBERG]

> When you render text with both hinting and antialias, then some
> characters are rendered with to little black. In effekt the
> characters looks grey and when you see a complete sentence it's easy
> to see that some parts are black and some are grey.
> 
> I'm sure you all know about this, but we that don't know much about
> font rendering wonder why, and if there is a solution to the
> problem. Will freetype 3 (or whatever) solve this?
> 
> Typicly the 'o' is to light and the 'w' is to black.
> 
> It's sad that it's more or less just with 12-16 points fonts that
> this is a problem, and it's just these sizes that almost everyone
> uses for the normal text they have. For fonts 18 points and up the
> result is just wonderfull.

You are using TrueType fonts, aren't you?

To say it with few words: Don't use hinting and anti-aliasing
simultaneously.

Reason:

  . For most fonts, hinting instructions have been optimized for
    non-aliased displays.

  . For anti-aliased fonts, you should use fractional pixel
    coordinates to position the glyph evenly spaced.  But hinting
    doesn't work with fractional coordinates.

For example, say `ftstring 14 times.ttf', press `a' and see how badly
hinting works if the glyph positions aren't integer values.  You can
compare the glyph shapes with `ftview 14 times.ttf' to see the
difference.


    Werner