Gentium: An award-winning font joins the free software world (NewsForge) [LWN.net]

Gentium: An award-winning font joins the free software world (NewsForge)

Posted Jan 28, 2006 6:50 UTC (Sat) by cga2001 (guest, #35510)
In reply to: Gentium: An award-winning font joins the free software world (NewsForge) by Ross
Parent article: Gentium: An award-winning font joins the free software world (NewsForge)

All I'm saying is that w/o AA we might stand a better chance of seeing affordable 300dpi+ displays and quality free fonts in the near future.. and as a result, preserve our eye vision. But due to the existence of this cheap - in every sense - AA hack.. neither hardware manufacturers nor font designers feel much of an urge to do much to improve the quality of text rendering on computer screens. With adequate AA.. so-so fonts like the bitstream vera.. nimbus etc. series globally look on a par with truly well-designed screen fonts (verdana.. tahoma..). So why bother..?

I am obvioulsy no font-rendering expert.. and I won't mind if someone more knowledgeable proves me wrong. In that painfully underdocumented area it would be nice to learn a little something..!

But I do believe that w/ the perverse effects I'm hinting at above, AA has done us more harm than good.. The mind boggles at its popularity within the OSS community.

As to the point/pixel ratio aspects I guess you were replying to somebody else's post..?

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Gentium: An award-winning font joins the free software world (NewsForge)

Posted Jan 28, 2006 7:04 UTC (Sat) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link]

The problem is that display resolutions haven't been going up at the same rate they used to. I'm still stuck using 1024x768 at work. Given that restriction AA is a very nice thing. I totally agree more resolution would be better... but it's not here today, at least for most people. Now correctly done, AA is not harmful and actually improves the display even on high-resolution screens -- in fact it works much better when the pixel widths are less than half of the width of the smallest lines in the font.

My point about font sizes was in reference to the article linked by Richard_J_Neill which talked about why AA was not the right solution.

Gentium: An award-winning font joins the free software world (NewsForge)

Posted Jan 29, 2006 1:07 UTC (Sun) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link]

With adequate AA.. so-so fonts like the bitstream vera.. nimbus etc. series globally look on a par with truly well-designed screen fonts (verdana.. tahoma..).

Then AA seems like a very efficient, useful "hack". Not only does it lower the hardware requirements, but saves significant human effort at the expense of a slight increase in software complexity.

If what you're saying is true, the "harm" is entirely psychological. If you are unable to visually distinguish "well designed" fonts from anti-aliased "so-so" fonts then your preference for the former is merely ideological bias.