Re: Font, layout units et al.

From: Leonard Rosenthol (leonardr@lazerware.com)
Date: Mon May 27 2002 - 22:06:10 EDT

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    At 10:26 PM +0200 5/27/02, Joaquín Cuenca Abela wrote:
    >I'm not 100% sure Tomas, but I've always heard of "hinting" like the
    >"grid-fitting" process.

            In font terminology, hinting is the process of applying the
    "hints" that the author(s) of an outline font included in the data
    for use in creating better looking bitmaps at smaller sizes.

    >The non-scaling factor that you're speaking about here is due to the
    >changes that each glyph suffers when it goes from a high size to a low
    >size, even when you keep it at high resolution (usually making the
    >characters wider to make them more easily readable).

            Right - which is why you should NEVER attempt to do text
    layout based on changes in font size. INSTEAD, you change the
    transformation matrix of the outline data to account for the scaling
    factor and then rerasterize the outline. That gives you a PERFECTLY
    SCALED result.

    >I don't understand that. Why that will help us to draw each character
    >at the right position?

            Because you get linear scaling...

    Leonard

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    Leonard Rosenthol                            <mailto:leonardr@lazerware.com>
                          			     <http://www.lazerware.com>
    


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