Sugar's fonts

[Yuan Chao]

On 9/30/07, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > The problem with serifs is that they often should be smaller
> > > than a pixel for typical screen and font sizes. Well, that is
> > Sure. But only in reflective mono mode.
> Anti-aliasing, which Linux/Pango/Cairo (hence the XO) readily
> supports, lets you do "sub-pixel" positioning of elements; I made a
Sub-pixel anti-alias rendering is provided by freetype w/o Pango/Cairo
since at least Redhat 8 if I remember correctly. However, it won't
increase the vertical resolution which is more important on serif
fonts that have thinner horizontal strokes than vertical ones. That's
why serif fonts look fainter on small texts. A gothic or black type
face has less problem here for its equal stroke width.

CJK fonts need more delicate hinting for more clear looking.
Unfortunately, a patch set on "autohint" of freetype by a Japanese
hacker, Akito, doesn't go to main stream and stopped maintained. In
order to have clear look for small sized fonts, we now tend to use
embedded bitmap fonts in TTF. On XO, reflective mono mode is of high
enough resolution that bitmap fonts are not needed. As to color mode,
a bitmap font won't look better than an outline font due to the
special color borrowing. It's good that the present font renderer
(autofit?) works good enough on normal sized fonts.

http://picasaweb.google.com/yuanchao/OLPC/photo#5097821500215590706

It's quite difficult to tell the strokes of the top texts in black.
Also for center parts the left-down strokes look blurriness. To me,
this is already the minimum readable size.

> Kanji font with Toshiba in the early 1980s with beautiful tapering
> stroke widths and serifs. Others have dramatically improved upon these
> techniques in the ensuing 3 decades.
Wow. You must be an expert here. Actually, Japanese had a quite large
influence on traditional printing in Taiwan. This is why we used to
call a serif type face "ming-ti" instead of "song-ti" (now we use
both) which corresponds to the Japanese "mincho" type face that means
the "Ming" dynasty of ancient China.


-- 
Best regards,
Yuan Chao