Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!uwm.edu!psuvax1!psuvm!cxt105
From: CXT105@psuvm.psu.edu (Christopher Tate)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Soft Fonts
Message-ID: <91140.122251CXT105@psuvm.psu.edu>
Date: 20 May 91 16:22:51 GMT
References: <13376@dog.ee.lbl.gov> <1991May20.085710.407@otago.ac.nz>
Distribution: all
Organization: Penn State University
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The new edition of "Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice" by Foley,
van Dam, Feiner, & Hughes talks a little about antialiased text and its
uses and implementation.  For example, IBM has developed the YODA display,
which uses antialiasing in its text display.

The general conclusion is that antialiased text looks very good, especially
at small point sizes (where standard monochrome scan converters have a hard
time making the text look good).  Unfortunately, there are only a couple of
ways to do antialiased text:  you can store the various font sizes the way
the Mac handles bitmap fonts, or you can generate the antialiasing on the
fly from something like the TrueType representation.  Both of these methods
have serious drawbacks -- the former takes a tremendous amount of storage
space for any large number of different point sizes, and the latter takes
a very long time to render, unless you play special tricks with the scan
converter and base character representation.  The special tricks tend to
involve things like changing the fundamental character definition so that
each character is represented as a union of rectangles, rather than a
spline contour (which is how TrueType and PostScript represent fonts).

The phrase that the book uses for the process of scaling/scan converting/
antialiasing the text on the fly from spline-based contour descriptions
is "computationally impractical."  :-)  Looks like a patch to TrueType
that does this would have its work cut out for it.....

-------
Christopher Tate                 |
                                 |   Sorry; it's classified.  I could tell
    cxt105@psuvm.psu.edu         |    you, but then I'd have to kill you.
    cxt105@psuvm.bitnet          |