From: Tomas Frydrych (tomas@frydrych.uklinux.net)
Date: Fri May 24 2002 - 12:46:13 EDT
> > What we should be doing is to request in both cases the same
> > point size, e.g. 12 points, but ask the system to apply a
> > transform to the fonts based on the target device resolution,
> > i.e., ~100 dpi for the screen and 1440 dpi for the PostScript
> > output.
> 
> Wouldn't this stop hinting of text at small font sizes from
> working? One of the reasons 10 and 12 point Times New Roman,
> Arial, Verdana, Minion Web &c. looks so good, is that they're
> manually hinted.
No, it would not, rather to the contrary. By always requesting the 
correct physical size, such as 12 pt you get the correct hinting, as 
the author intended. You just tell the rasterizer that your device has 
say 72dpi resolution, and so it will create bitmaps where 1 point is 
represented by one pixel, and if you tell it to use 1440dpi it will give 
you 20 pixels per point. What we do at the moment for the 
PostScript is that we request font of size 240pt instead of 12 pt, so 
we do not get the hinting intended for 12 pt, but for 240 and they 
are, as you point out different; this causes us major difficulties be 
cause we use the metrics for the 240pt font to do the layout, but 
when we ask the operating system, or at least win32, to do the 
drawing, it will use a 12pt font with the 12 metric and things just do 
not add up.
Tomas
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