Edges of fonts appear distorted/less smooth

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lmeurs
Posts: 9
Joined: 2008-11-05T04:33:00-07:00

Re: Edges of fonts appear distorted/less smooth

Post by lmeurs »

Ok, the problem is sort of solved by installing Fedora instead of Suse on the clients server, but locally we also work on Windows and the same distorted effect has always occurred on this workstation. Not that big of a deal, as long as the online results are ok, right?

But today I found out the strangest thing that might have helped us when looking for the cause: the rough edges only appear when we use a font smaller than 22px on the Windows workstation! Isn't that awkward?

I put a screenshot online:

Image

Again: the exact same TTF fonts (relatively addressed) and scripts were used on both Windows and Fedora!

Does this maybe have to do with a setting or something? Anyone, anyone...? :-)
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anthony
Posts: 8883
Joined: 2004-05-31T19:27:03-07:00
Authentication code: 8675308
Location: Brisbane, Australia

Re: Edges of fonts appear distorted/less smooth

Post by anthony »

Now that is weird. My suggestion however is to look at the freetype developer/forum is they exist. Or even just there change log.

Also check what version is being used on windows, SuSE and Fedora.
Anthony Thyssen -- Webmaster for ImageMagick Example Pages
https://imagemagick.org/Usage/
charlie

Re: Edges of fonts appear distorted/less smooth

Post by charlie »

Greetings,
All of you were so close - which is not to say any of you were wrong. ;)

The actual cause is font hinting. In most cases you can achieve near
identical results inspite of the differences in Type engines. A long time
ago, I ran into some issues with font rendering on my display (X11). So I "dug in"
to discover why my newly acquired hi-end equipment rendered such crappy looking
fonts! Well, after quite a lot of research and development, I finally had good
looking fonts - and a very intimate understanding of fonts (typesetting), their history,
Display management (X11, Windows, etc...), and more. Because I felt others might also
be suffering the same problem, and not have the resources to do the "detective work"
that I did. I wrote an article: http://hosting.1command.com/faq/X11/X11-AAfonts.phtml on it.
PLEASE NOTE:
My server farm runs on the BSD family of Operating Systems. But, as at the time
I wrote the article, Linux was more popular, it is more geared to Linux users.
To a moderately capable SysAdmin the translation should be trivial. :)
ALSO. Please note the site is in a "holding pattern". As such, some of it doesn't work.
Reason being; I currently own/host/maintain 200+ domains. As such, I needed
a decent CMS, or management system. It's way too daunting a
task to manage all the code to maintain them by hand. So, I set out to first
evaluate all the possibilities available, before "re-inventing the wheel". 361 evaluations
later, I've adopted 5 (projects were abandoned), and decided to write my own.
So the site listed above is using a CMS I do not care for, but was easy to
layup as an interim "holding pattern" while I complete my CMS. Sorry. :S

HTH!

--Chuck

P.S. If you should have any questions, feel free to give me a shout! :)

P.P.S. In short, in order to achieve your desired results, you'll have to
use different font directories/folders - one for each OS. So that they can
properly "hint" for their font unique rendering system/libraries.
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