15 Jul 2003 freetype   » (Master)

Life

These last months have been incredibly intensive. Lucie got her first surgical operation to repair her palate. It's been a bit hard but everything's well now. The next one is scheduled in 6 months. Apart from that, she's a really cute baby, and we love the way she smiles in the morning when waking up :-)

Moved

We finally left Paris, to move to my grand-parents house in the country. Preparation has been tedious, so was moving and installation, but we're happy at last. I need vacations though, and an ISDN line too :-)

Fonts

Didn't have the time to do anything on FreeType or anything else. I'd like to answer mslicker's latest rant by saying that font anti-aliasing has nothing to do with usability or legibility, since it's purely an aesthetics and technical question. Consider that:

  • anti-aliased fonts look cool. that's why games have been using them years before our desktops could support them, even though these were hand-drawn by artists

  • properly designed bitmaps are nice, but they are simply unable to scale gracefully, hence the advent of scalable fonts.

  • scalable fonts look atrocious in monochrome mode without adjustments, hence the invention of font "hinting" and "grid-fitting". A small number of high-quality TrueType fonts produce results that are similar to hand-tuned bitmaps at small character pixel sizes, but they require a lot of work from font designers. Apart from these, most scalable fonts still look "ugly" in monochrome mode.

  • Most of these ugly fonts look better when anti-aliased. Moreover, it's easier to get correct to good results when automatically hinting fonts for anti-aliased rather than monochrome output.

  • certain things like device-independent display are fairly better supported when using anti-aliased rendering, especially when disabling hinting.

Note that for some reason (aesthetics), people tend to have very strong opinions regarding fonts, be it from pundits, Slashdot readers or ordinary users.

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