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From: josip@ra.src.umd.edu (Josip Loncaric)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer,comp.sys.mac.system
Subject: Re: QuickDraw problem with drawing certain fonts
Keywords: QuickDraw fonts bugs
Message-ID: <1990Aug7.165128.4187@ra.src.umd.edu>
Date: 7 Aug 90 16:51:28 GMT
References: <1990Aug2.163757.19572@ra.src.umd.edu> <1990Aug3.010400.28725@Neon.Stanford.EDU> <15305@reed.UUCP>
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Organization: Systems Research Center, University of Maryland, College Park
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In article <15305@reed.UUCP> barry@reed.UUCP (Barry Smith) writes:
>
>Is it not apparent to anyone with any typographic familiarity that the
>nominal point size has no necessary correlation with the actual measure? 
>And further, that the reference point and advance width have no necessary
>correlation with the bounding box of the character image?  Apple system
>software, on the other hand, has recurring problems with drawing
>zero-width characters, and with characters whose bounding box does not
>fall entirely between the reference point and the advance width.
>
>Second, the question of "allowable point sizes": Here, the references are
>somewhat less than authoritative.  Ben Hekster points out Inside Macintosh
>I-228, that says "The maximum [font height] is 127 pixels" (Ben makes some
>other comments that I'll cheerfully ignore; I've read the book before).

	(... comments on other specific QuickDraw font rendering bugs ...)

I agree with Mr. Smith - in particular, the 127pt limitation on character
height should not apply to Mac II (see Inside Macintosh Vol. V, page V-185,
where it says that on Mac II "the largest practical font" is "255 points").
Of course, if one does not use a character height table (where heights are
packed into 1-byte wide fields), even taller characters can be described
by the FONT resource.  The fact that QuickDraw cannot interpret correctly
even the characters which are less than 255 points tall (but more than 127)
means that QD does have bug(s) in rendering characters.

From all I have learned about this problem, the burden for fixing it seems
to lie with Apple.  My main point is that real users are suffering because
of QuickDraw character rendering bugs, and that Apple should take a second
look at its code.  I am not the only user of Macintosh with this problem,
over here we have several departments using several dozen Mac IIs to
prepare papers and technical reports, and since I begun talking to people,
a lot of them have reported similar problems, especially in previewing
output on screen at dot-for-dot magnification.

This is an important problem for a computer which supposedly is intended
for DTP use.  Apple should fix it, and please do not tell me that
TrueType will solve all of our problems.  I need a solution yesterday,
not in a couple of years.

<josip@ra.src.umd.edu>


--
Josip Loncaric / SRC / U. of Maryland, College Park, MD 20745