Re: [TCLUG:19169] Netscape fonts

[Mike Hicks <hick0088@tc.umn.edu>]

Bill Layer wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I've been living with Netscape not displaying fonts correctly since I
> installed Linux, and I decided that it was time to fix this. I've posed
> the question to #linux on DalNET and EfNET but nobody seems to have a
> clue. So now I seek the wisdom of the TCLUG list.

Well, everybody's been `living with it' for a while.  I've never gotten
the fonts to display exactly as I want, but things are not made any
easier by page designers that tune their pages for their own displays. 
Of course, most everyone does that when they make a web page.

> Why does Netscape display many common fonts (like Verdana for instance)
> incorrectly? For instance, if a page is written in Verdana, I see Courier
> or some other ugly fixed-width font. The font sizes are wrong as well,
> the displayed characters usually being far too small in size.

A large part of the problem is that the sets of fonts in Windows and
Linux do not overlap.  There are even largely different font sets
between Linux and other Unices.  In the end, web designers usually have
to resort to using fonts known to exist on all platforms, or using
aliases such as `serif', `sans-serif', and `monospaced'.
 
As far as I know, there are only two or three fonts in X Windows that
can be considered `full' fonts, meaning that they are able to display as
normal, bold, and italic.  Netscape defaults to using Times Roman,
although I usually prefer Helvetica.  On Windows, Helvetica is
apparently not very popular, and many people use Arial (or Verdana?)
instead.

I believe that many fonts are encoded incorrectly, saying that they are
a certain size when they really are something very different.  IMHO, any
12pt font should appear to be the same size as any other 12pt font. 
Granted, there are certain cases (with strange and frilly fonts, for
example) where this doesn't work very well.  However, it's not very fun
to see that 12pt Arial looks gargantuan compared to 12pt Courier, or
whatever...

I wish that there were some better tools for font creation under Linux
and Unix.  I know that some very good fonts have been created in the
past (TeX fonts, for example, are of very high quality, although I
understand TeX's creator shelled out a big chunk-o-change to get them
made..).  I know that there are a number of tools for dealing with fixed
fonts (BDF and PCF for X Windows), but I haven't seen any for scalable
fonts (like TrueType and Type 1).

Some fonts end up looking `chunky' when they are displayed because the
system is scaling fonts that were never meant to be scaled.  IMHO,
fixed-sized fonts have their place, but I don't really like them on web
pages.  However, many scalable fonts often look really crummy with the
current X Windows font subsystem.  Fortunately, the FreeType people are
working on that problem and have done some work with `auto-hinting'
[http://freetype.sourceforge.net/autohinting/], which should do a lot to
make fonts look better in any X applications that use scalable fonts.

Anti-aliasing is the process of `smoothing' edges by using colors that
are not just white or just black.  The grays in between are also used,
to make the fonts look a little cleaner.  There are a lot of people who
complain about them, though.  I'm not exactly sure why, but I think
Microsoft has done the best to show why with their recent
(re-)development of ClearType.  Computers represent the brightness of a
pixel on a linear scale, while your monitor displays color on a more
logarithmic scale.  If your font smoothing algorithms don't take this
into account, your fonts can become much less readable.  In fact, I
imagine that nearly all graphics manipulation software that scales
images or that deals with `blurring' is affected by this problem.

I guess I didn't provide any answers, but I hope I provided a fairly
accurate description of the problems...

-- 
 _  _  _  _ _  ___    _ _  _  ___ _ _  __   I came, I saw, I 
/ \/ \(_)| ' // ._\  / - \(_)/ ./| ' /(__   conquered. -- Tux 
\_||_/|_||_|_\\___/  \_-_/|_|\__\|_|_\ __)                             
[ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088@tc.umn.edu ]