From: Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Feb 19 2003 - 20:19:39 EST
Hi guys.
I've been reading this thread with much interest yet
it occurs to me that maybe something has been missed.
The whole problem is that fonts do not scale in a
linear fashion. As far as I am aware this is due to
font hinting where fonts are made to look good when
rasterized at small sizes. The problem then arises
when a font at a small size is zoomed to a large size,
thus making the font engine not bother with hinting.
(The reverse is also possible but less likely).
Perhaps there is another factor which also adds to
non-linearity and if so, this seems to be well
addressed by the methods already discussed.
In the case of hinting though, this is part of the
rasterizing process and thus affects the bitmaps and
not the outline. Therefore applying any
transformations to the outline is going to result in
the same whether it's because of font size or zoom.
To zoom a hinted glyph would mean to zoom the bitmap
which would mean chunky pixels - yuck.
The only way around this I can see is if FreeType et
al had methods specifically for producing zoomed
outlines of small-sized fonts which preserved the
hinted metrics.
Please let me know if I'm completely off track (:
Andrew Dunbar.
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