fungus wrote:
> I'm having real trouble getting text to look right
> under X. I've spent the whole day wrestling with
> a few problems.
>
> First of all, when I draw text I get missing pixels.
> eg. The first column of my lower case letter 'a'
> is missing.
>
> I assumed it was me but I eventually spotted that
> xfd has exactly the same trouble. See the screenshot
> here:
>
> http://www.artlum.com/snapshot10.png
>
> On the right is my test text, on the left is xfd.
> In both programs the lower-case 'a' is missing the
> left hand column of pixels.
>
> Can anybody comment on this...?
>
> Do other people get the same problem? The command
> I used to launch xfd is at the bottom of the screenshot.
>
>
> Next up, the spacing of the text never seems to be right.
> eg. Look at the last word in the second line from the
> bottom in my test text - "kicked". The letter 'i' is one
> pixel over to the left.
>
> I can draw the text letter-by letter or draw the entire
> line of text using "XDrawString()" and I get the exact
> same results. With that font at that size it seems the
> letter 'i' and letter 'l' are both offset by one pixel.
> I've used other fonts/sizes but it never looks quite
> right, there's always some letter in the wrong place.
>
> I find it hard to believe that it's the fonts because
> Microsoft uses the same "monotype-times new roman" font
> in Windows and there's no problems.
>
> Anybody comments on this...? Is the Linux font renderer
> a bit flakey?

How old is your X installation? The missing columns can be
due to the font renderer not doing any hinting. The incorrect
positioning means no kerning is done either. Maybe your xorg.conf
hasn't loaded any decent font modules (like a recent freetype).

Russell Shaw wrote:
>
> How old is your X installation? The missing columns can be
> due to the font renderer not doing any hinting. The incorrect
> positioning means no kerning is done either. Maybe your xorg.conf
> hasn't loaded any decent font modules (like a recent freetype).

It's SUSE 10.0, not exactly old.


--
<\___/>
/ O O \
\_____/ FTB. For email, remove my socks.

In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know
that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,'
and then they actually change their minds and you never
hear that old view from them again. They really do it.
It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists
are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens
every day. I cannot recall the last time something like
that happened in politics or religion.

- Carl Sagan, 1987 CSICOP keynote address

Russell Shaw wrote:
>
> How old is your X installation? The missing columns can be
> due to the font renderer not doing any hinting. The incorrect
> positioning means no kerning is done either. Maybe your xorg.conf
> hasn't loaded any decent font modules (like a recent freetype).

I just check the actual installation and I've got
freetype2 version 2.1.10-4 installed on the machine.

I've been using fonts on Linux for about a day and
I find it hard to believe I'm the only person who's
ever spotted these problems.

It looks like the only way to get small text on Linux
is to use the bitmap versions of the fonts when
available and scalable fonts otherwise. This opens
up another can of worms though because the support
for international characters is going to vary with
font size as the bitmap fonts don't support the
same charset as the scalable fonts.


--
<\___/>
/ O O \
\_____/ FTB. For email, remove my socks.

In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know
that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,'
and then they actually change their minds and you never
hear that old view from them again. They really do it.
It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists
are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens
every day. I cannot recall the last time something like
that happened in politics or religion.

- Carl Sagan, 1987 CSICOP keynote address

fungus wrote:
> Russell Shaw wrote:
>
>> How old is your X installation? The missing columns can be
>> due to the font renderer not doing any hinting. The incorrect
>> positioning means no kerning is done either. Maybe your xorg.conf
>> hasn't loaded any decent font modules (like a recent freetype).
>
> I just check the actual installation and I've got
> freetype2 version 2.1.10-4 installed on the machine.
>
> I've been using fonts on Linux for about a day and
> I find it hard to believe I'm the only person who's
> ever spotted these problems.

Check that you're using a font file that isn't ancient.
What format is it? (truetype, type1, bdf, etc)

> It looks like the only way to get small text on Linux
> is to use the bitmap versions of the fonts when
> available and scalable fonts otherwise. This opens
> up another can of worms though because the support
> for international characters is going to vary with
> font size as the bitmap fonts don't support the
> same charset as the scalable fonts.

Scaleable fonts can work at small sizes if the hinting is
working. For patent reasons, the freetype truetype hinting
may be set to the free autohinting instead of the better
bytecode one. It can usually be enabled in a config file.

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