K. K. Subramaniam wrote:
On Monday 20 April 2009 9:17:38 pm Bert Freudenberg wrote:
Linux and Windows users are accustomed to heavily hinted font rendering, looking overly "crisp" because lines are snapped to the screen pixel grid. The result has little resemblance to the true character shape as it would appear when printed on paper, but it's what they are used to. In contrast, Apple's and Adobe's font rendering is much more truthful to the paper appearance, but looks "blurry" to Windows and Linux users
Squeak's screen and its contents are meant to be consumed on bitmap monitors and rarely printed on paper, so why should the fonts be optimized for paper rendering and not display monitors?
Confused .. Subbu
Hi Subbu,
It isn't a question of optimization for a particular medium. Printers can render fonts at high resolution, so the quality of the rendering is quite good: crisp edges, smooth curves and high fidelity to the letter shapes defined by the font. Screens are much lower resolution, and especially at smaller point sizes, it's impossible to match the rendering quality of a printer.
So how do we get a good image at low resolution? Apple's strategy is to alter the *intensity* of certain pixels in the rendered image to preserve fidelity to the letter shapes and provide the illusion of smooth curves. Microsoft's strategy is to alter the *position* of certain pixels in the rendered image to preserve the crisp edges that one finds in printed text.
Apple emphasizes fidelity to the font's character shapes, resulting in bluriness, while Microsoft emphasizes clarity, resulting in distortion. Either is a reasonable choice.
Colin