Re: pixel fonts

Chris Lilley wrote:
> 
> Treating a pixel font (or an outline font rendered with anti-aliasing) as
> an alpha channel rather than as image data has interesting possibilities,
> such as true antialiased text of any color on any color background, or
> foreground images on display type.

This kind of antialiasing of any colour text on any background (plain
colour or multicolour bitmap images) is technology already deployed in
some OSes - it works superbly for me on my machine (Acorn Risc PC) and
the quality of rendering is extremely good.  You should be able to buy
a NetStation within a couple of months which contains this technology
and see it for yourself (http://www.acorn.co.uk/).  Has this sort of
technology been considered by the Fonts group?  (or is it being, or
will it be?)

> Not just Opentype, any font which is used on the Web must adress these
> concerns. There is a balance to be struck between hindering legitimate use and
> hindering illegitimate use; just a s there is a balance to be struck by font
> vendors between focussing on a small number of phototypsetting bureaux and a
> large number of Web site authors as potential markets.

This is a genuine question, not meant to be sarcastic: what kind of
technology is it that the font designers wish to protect here?  Is it the
bezier data? The kerning and hinting information, that sort of thing?

> >   However, it would be necessary to show how
> > the bitmap font approach can be made amenable to high quality printing.
> 
> That seems to be an important requirement, as print-on-demand shops that
> generate 'books" of printed and bound document sets looks like a growth area.

Isn't this exactly the kind of thing that the font vendors wish to
prevent - high quality print reprodution?  This is one way in which
they could preserve their control on their fonts - license them to such
print-on-demand shops. 

-- 
Stewart Brodie, Electronics & Computer Science, Southampton University.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~snb94r/      http://delenn.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

Received on Friday, 9 August 1996 08:21:20 UTC