Re: [gtk-list] Re: GdkFonts (or rather, fonts in X)

[Valdis Kletnieks vt edu]

On Sat, 19 Feb 2000 00:33:40 EST, Havoc Pennington <hp@redhat.com>  said:
> GnomeCanvasText does the following:
>  - draws all characters in the bitmap font to a Pixmap
>  - copies the Pixmap to an XImage
>  - grabs the pixels from the XImage
>  - scales the whole font as a single huge bitmap
>  - draws characters by copying out regions of the huge bitmap
> 
> So, I guess "yes" but it is a) butt slow and b) butt ugly and c) the
> most gruesome hack imaginable.
> 
> > I've seen some really
> > horrid (blocky, mis-sized) fonts in Netscape under Linux, implying that
> > you could scale bitmap fonts but that they will look like crap.  Is that
> > true?
> I'm not sure which aspect of X font suckiness causes this particular
> sucky effect.

Anybody want to place bets that either Netscape or the X font server
did the same "scale the font" trick that GnomeCanvasText does? ;)

Of course, there's no good way to scale a font if it's not designed
to scale.  Things like serif's and the width of curves are notoriously
non-linear.  For example, if you have a 12 point capital O, the sides
really need to be a bit *more* than half the thickness of the sides
of a 24-point O in order to keep the same visual "weight" - if you scale
it proportionally, the larger point sizes start getting too "heavy".

Fonts in general suck... But yes, X fonts suck even more than others.

				Valdis Kletnieks
				Operating Systems Analyst
				Virginia Tech