- From: Bill Hill <billhill@microsoft.com>
- Date: Thu, 25 Jan 96 16:38:14 PST
- To: i-simond@microsoft.com, www-font@w3.org
i think there's a better way of handling display faces than this. for a start, why should we be saddled with the anti-aliasing used in Photoshop? research has shown that people recognize words mostly by the high-frequency information - the contrasts between dark stems and light backgrounds, or light stems and dark backgrounds. PhotoShop's anti-aliasing blurs ALL of the letters, degrading the high-frequency parts as well. The (TrueType) anti-aliasing in Windows 95 Plus! is much more sophisticated in its approach, since it first grid-fits the letters to regularize stems, etc., then applies anti-aliasing only to the places it's needed (curves and diagonals) while leaving stems, crossbars and serifs alone. the high-frequency information is retained. also, Win95's anti-aliasing is applied "on the fly", which means your text is still text, not a bit-map. so it's scalable, searchable, editable, localizable, etc.. if you've ever been involved in puting out information that has to be updated, or localized into other languages, you'll know what a complete pain anti-aliased bitmaps are to deal with. How are you going to use software to search for a heading if it's in a vector graphics format? now, Win95 anti-aliasing isn't cross-platform, obviously. but well-hinted TrueType is. Yes, there are different Macintosh and Windows font files, but if a library of enough useable faces was freely available people could download what they needed. And they'd get good print as well. With properly-designed and hinted faces, some faces will work well for both text and display. For the sake of variety, we probably do need some faces which are display-only. These could be handled differently; for example, they might have reduced character-sets. They could be hinted only down to, say, 14 point on VGA (a lot of hinting data in a text font is taken up by delta instructions aimed at getting the best representation at small sizes - 12pt and below). These are just some ideas; would need to be looked at in more detail. bill ---------- From: Simon Daniels (EDP) To: <www-font@w3.org> Subject: display vs text faces Date: Thursday, January 25, 1996 8:41PM Has anyone considered handling display and text faces differently? For text fonts I think Bill is right. You need to have a scalable format so that the type works in print as well as on screen. The font files are bloated as they have to include either hinting information or bitmap screen fonts. I can't see a problem with a format such as TrueType for text, (except getting the same font file to work on multiple platforms) But for display text (anything over HTML font size=7) perhaps a different approach would be more suitable. The great thing about using bitmaps for display typography, such as titles and logos, is that you can perform all manner of digital jiggery-pokery on them using Photoshop etc. The bad thing is that they don't print out very well. Perhaps a vector format like eps should be used... Display typography which is resolution independent, scalable, can be multi coloured and with no complicated copyright issues associated with distributing fonts that can be downloaded and reused elsewhere. Perhaps Adobe could be persuaded to release the rasterizing/ antialiasing routines from PhotoShop for inclusion in browsers. Simon Daniels (i-simond@microsoft.com) these views are my own and no not necessarily reflect those of my employer etc.
Received on Thursday, 25 January 1996 19:35:20 UTC