Just one minor error [LWN.net]

Just one minor error

Posted Sep 24, 2007 19:21 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
Parent article: Font rasterization techniques

Great article - perhaps it'll lead to the better font handling eventually. Just one minor error. "I'm not sure, but probably the MS Word developers calculate the glyph advance at a high resolution for unhinted glyphs" - this is just simply wrong. We do know what they do to calculate distance! They are using printer's context! That's why DEVMODE stucture is there in OOXML! This is the only way to produce consistent output from MS Word on the same system. Want to print 1000-pages document with the same layout on different printer with different resolution ? Well - you are out of lack: Word will repaginate the text and you'll get different line and page breaks!

Well-known ages old problem, still true today. Of course nowadays typical resolution of printer is 600dpi and this mitigates the problem somewhat but select old 144dpi 9dot matrix printer in your system as default - and watch how layout of big documents goes to hell.

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Just one minor error

Posted Sep 24, 2007 20:04 UTC (Mon) by AJWM (guest, #15888) [Link]

That (mis)behaviour also causes another problem with emailed docs -- Word sits there for several minutes trying to contact the specific printer that the doc was saved with before giving up and asking you if you want Word to keep on trying. Sheesh.

(It doesn't always do this, I've never figured out the dependency. Maybe if there's a network printer involved or something. Or if certain fonts are used.)