Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 23rd Jun 2009 21:40 UTC
The Engineering 7 weblog has an item about the improvements made in the ClearType font rendering technology which has been included in Windows since Windows XP. While I won't go too deeply into that post, I did figure it was a good opportunity to talk about font antialiasing in general; which type do you prefer?
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Member since:2005-07-07
More true to print and the shape of the characters my ass! I think that's my problem with it, the 'true to print' approach seems to put too much emphasis on the character and not enough on the SPACING of the letters (aka Kerning) and words.
Kerning is controlled by the font itself not the rendering technology.
Member since:2006-11-02
Kerning is controlled by the font itself not the rendering technology.
The font is data. The renderer processes the data to create what you see on screen. If the renderer ignores the kerning information supplied with the font, you get bad kerning. I'm not sure how you would imagine 'the font' controlling something the 'rendering technology' does not.
JAL
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:11 UTC, submitted by Drumhellar
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Member since:
2005-07-12
Is all the people saying that the apple approach, or even worse the freetype approach, is 'better formed' and 'closer to print'...
I wasn't aware that when printing the letter "i" it should dance around like a Mexican jumping bean inside a word just based on how far across the page it is. I was not aware that two instances of the same word on a page only have a 80 in 1 chance of rendering the same appearance twice... More true to print and the shape of the characters my ass! I think that's my problem with it, the 'true to print' approach seems to put too much emphasis on the character and not enough on the SPACING of the letters (aka Kerning) and words.
Either way though - seriously, if it ends up the same number of words per line how big a difference is it apart from elitist art snobbery and placebo effect?
For the handful of artsy people for whom it ALLEGEDLY makes a difference, build that type of rendering into the program (pagemaker, quark) so they can sit there dicking with the kerning one tenth of a pica at a time as if it matters, and give the rest of us fonts that look good on SCREEN.
Edited 2009-06-24 05:31 UTC