Re: Font Quality Windows Vista64

[Jeremy Moles <jeremy emperorlinux com>]

On Thu, 2009-01-29 at 16:55 +0100, Peter Frentrup wrote:
> Jeremy Moles schrieb:
> > Hello all! I'm writing a cross platform OpenGL application that uses
> > Pangocairo to render fonts. In Linux, the results I get are
> > superb--arguably better than anything else out in a 3D application. :) I
> > couldn't happier.
> >
> > However, I setup my development environment for Windows last night
> > (using the free MSVC2008) and used the gtk+ "bundle" linked to on the
> > Pango website. In Windows, using the same code, the quality I get is
> > pretty wretched--there's literally no hinting, and the glyphs sometimes
> > appear to be off-by-one pixel or so.
> >
> > What I'm looking for are some hints as to how to get the best quality
> > fonts in Windows. Is there a way to force Pango to use a particular
> > backend? Is there a configuration problem perhaps? Does anyone else use
> > Pangocairo in Windows and get high-quality results?
> Hi,
> I do not know exactly what you mean, but I experienced that font 
> rendering to bitmaps with an alpha channel via Cairo looks ugly on 
> Windows (Subpixel rendering gets wrong).
> Maybe you are also using ARGB buffers.

I'm actually only using CAIRO_FORMAT_A8, since I _only_ need the alpha.

> If you do not realy need an alpha channel, use RGB buffers as a workaround.
> 
> Another workaround might be to use paths (pango_cairo_layout_path() ... 
> cairo_fill() ) instead of directly printing text. But this eventually 
> slows things down in large texts and it is not trivial to implement when 
> you want to use different colours.

I don't think it's anything like this. I think that Win32 ClearType
backend is just bad (or at least configured wrong), so I'd like to
either figure out what I'm doing incorrectly or find out how to coerce
Pango to use the Freetype backend on Windows.

> Bye,
> Peter
>