[Fenfire-dev] Font hinting

[Benja Fallenstein]

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Ouch. Big ouch. Now I know why text in OpenGL still looks bad.

Vector fonts need hinting when rendered at small sizes. The difference
is staggering, and non-hinted text looks bad in a way that reminds me a
lot of how Libvob/OpenGL text looks bad. Look at this online demo:

~    http://mbox.troja.mff.cuni.cz/~peak/ftdemo/index.cgi

Try e.g. arial.ttf at size 12 with hinting and without.

There's another lesson to learn here as well. I talked about this with
Tuomas some time ago, and he thought that hinting does not change font
metrics except on the especially sophisticated TeX fonts. Wrong. If you
look at e.g. bookce.ttf in the demo, turning hinting on clearly changes
the width of the characters. This means that text layout needs to take
into account the actual scale that the characters will be rendered at.

Does anybody have an idea how we can get hinting implemented in
Libvob/OpenGL?

- - Benja
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