Re: real vs. synthetic width glyphs

fantasai wrote:

> Sometimes half-width glyphs is the right way to do that. Sometimes
> you get better results just with proportional-width glyphs, because
> of differences in the width of the glyphs. Half-width glyphs have a
> mono-space characteristic; narrow characters are made to look wider,
> wide characters squashed to be narrow. If you combine a narrow
> character with a wide one, sometimes that fits within 1em without
> the squashing and stretching, and that result looks better than
> flipping into a monospaced glyph set.

I've put together a non-digit example that shows the difference between
always using half-width glyphs vs. scaling the default, proprotional glyphs.

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2013Jul/0014.html

I don't think scaling proportional glyphs is going to lead to better
results, it's going to lead to more inconsistent results.  The scaling
factor will need to be different for different pairs of characters. 
For example, 'II' may need no scaling while 'MM' will need a lot more.
See the example above, case (3) is the unscaled case and case (5)
shows the scaled result.  Notice how in case (5) the 'MM' looks like
an entirely different font weight was used.  Especially at smaller
sizes this will reduce readability.  The use of half-width variants,
case (4), gives much more consistent readability in this situation.

Regards,

John Daggett

Received on Tuesday, 9 July 2013 04:57:29 UTC