Re: Fonts and readability

["Sergey I. Panov" <sipan mit edu>]

On Thu, Jan 13, 2000 at 09:17:39PM -0500, Owen Taylor wrote:
> 
> Derek Simkowiak <dereks@kd-dev.com> writes:
> 
> > 	I was looking at msdn.microsoft.com (hey, I was curious) and I
> > found an article on fonts and readability, and Microsoft's new "ClearType"
> > product:
> > 
> > http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/backgrnd/html/cleartype.htm
> > 
> > 	It's poorly written (the author takes three pages to say that
> > monitors are lower res than books, and it reads like the guy works in the
> > MS marketing department) but it covers some interesting details about
> > pixel resolution, fonts, and making things more readable.  I'd be
> > interested to know if any of this technology can be integrated into Gnome
> > (or, more likely, into X).

I ran into that "ClearType" thing when I was wastin one of my days
reading T1, TT, and OpenType documentaion (mussing the idea of using
available TT fons in the gnome-print ides directly). My impression was that
"ClearType" is a proper fonts + a proper scaling + an old good antialiasing.
Am I wrong?
 
> To put it briefly, what X needs is well constructed, free set of
> scaleable fonts covering all the common scripts in a few styles.
 
 MS freely downloadable TT fonts collection? Is there some licensing
problem? They do cover all the common scripts and styles.

> And it needs a decent font API.

 What's that? Font metrics availability to the applications?

 Regards,
           Sergey